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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
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +000013- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{in,out,err} now causes a flush() and
14 an ferror() call.
15
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +000016- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
17 list.sort().
18
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +000019- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
20 (2+3) --> (5).
21
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +000022- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
23
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000024
25Extension Modules
26-----------------
27
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +000028- The spwd has been added, allowing access to the shadow password database.
29
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +000030- stat_float_times is now True.
31
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +000032- array.array objects are now picklable.
33
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +000034- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
35 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
36
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +000037- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
38 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
39 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
40
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +000041- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
42 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000043
44Library
45-------
46
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +000047- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
48
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +000049- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
50
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +000051- Enhancements to the csv module:
52
53 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
54 reflecting it's capabilities, and improving it's compliance with
55 PEP 305.
56 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
57 reporting.
58 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
59 dictates.
60 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +000061 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +000062 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +000063 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
64 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +000065 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
66 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +000067 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +000068 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
69 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
70 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
71 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
72 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
73 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
74 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
75 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
76 without first creating a dialect class.
77 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
78 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
79 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +000080 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +000081 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
82 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +000083 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
84 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
85 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
86 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +000087 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
88 This has been fixed.
89
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +000090- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
91 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
92 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
93 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
94
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +000095- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
96
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +000097- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
98 (Bug #951915).
99
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000100- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
101 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
102 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
103 encoding alias table
104
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000105- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
106
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000107- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
108 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
109
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000110- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
111
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000112- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
113
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000114- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
115
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000116- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
117
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000118- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
119
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000120- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
121 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
122 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
123
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000124- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000125 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000126
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000127- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
128 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
129 tokenizer with very long source lines.
130
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000131- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
132 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
133
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000134- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
135 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000136
137Build
138-----
139
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000140- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
141 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
142 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
143 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
144 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
145 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
146 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
147 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
148
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000149
150C API
151-----
152
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000153- Removed PyRange_New().
154
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000155
156Tests
157-----
158
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000159- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000160
161Mac
162---
163
164
165
166Tools/Demos
167-----------
168
169
170
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000171What's New in Python 2.4 final?
172===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000173
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000174*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000175
176Core and builtins
177-----------------
178
179- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
180 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
181 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
182
183
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000184What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
185==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000186
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000187*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000188
189Core and builtins
190-----------------
191
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000192- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
193 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
194 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
195
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000196
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000197Library
198-------
199
200- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
201 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
202 raised is re-raised.
203
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000204- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
205 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
206
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000207- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
208 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
209 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
210 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
211 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
212 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
213 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
214 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
215 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
216 by the slice are recomputed now.
217
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000218- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000219
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000220Build
221-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000222
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000223- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
224 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
225 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000226
227C API
228-----
229
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000230- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
231
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000232
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000233What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
234================================
235
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000236*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000237
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000238License
239-------
240
241The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
242is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
243changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
244Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
245intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
246durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
247the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
248License::
249
250 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
251
252says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
253to Python 2.1.1.
254
255The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
256License Version 2.
257
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000258Core and builtins
259-----------------
260
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000261- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
262 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
263 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
264 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
265 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
266 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
267 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
268 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
269 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
270 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
271
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000272- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000273
274Extension Modules
275-----------------
276
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000277- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
278 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
279 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
280 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000281
282Library
283-------
284
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000285- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
286 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
287 returned.
288
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000289- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
290
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000291- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
292 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
293
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000294- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
295
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000296- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
297 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000298
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000299- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
300
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000301- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
302
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000303- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000304 the source code is updated and reloaded.
305
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000306Build
307-----
308
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000309- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000310
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000311What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
312================================
313
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000314*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000315
316Core and builtins
317-----------------
318
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000319- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000320 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
321
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000322- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
323 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
324 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
325 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
326
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000327- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
328 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
329
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000330- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
331 constant.
332
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000333- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
334 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
335 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
336 large), and to anomalies such as
337 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
338 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
339 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
340 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000341
342Extension modules
343-----------------
344
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000345- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
346 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000347 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
348 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
349 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000350
351Library
352-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000353
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000354- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000355 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000356 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
357 --swig-cpp.
358
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000359- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
360 it is set.
361
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000362- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000363
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000364- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
365 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
366 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
367 Closes bug #1039270.
368
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000369- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000370
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000371 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000372 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
373 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
374 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
375 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
376 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
377 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
378 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
379 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
380 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
381 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
382 + Updates to documentation.
383
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000384- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
385 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
386 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
387 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
388
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000389- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000390
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000391- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
392 applications should use the getmember function.
393
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000394- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
395
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000396- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
397 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
398 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
399 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
400 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
401 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
402 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
403 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
404 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
405
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000406- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
407 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000408 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000409
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000410- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
411 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
412 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
413 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
414 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
415 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
416 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
417 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000418
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000419- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
420 the new public features (of which there are many).
421
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000422- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000423 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
424 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
425 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
426 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000427 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000428
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000429- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
430
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000431- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
432 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
433 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
434 options.
435
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000436- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
437 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
438 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
439 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
440 conditions under which non-string values work.
441
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000442Build
443-----
444
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000445- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
446 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
447 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
448
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000449- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
450 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
451 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
452 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
453 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000454
455C API
456-----
457
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000458- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
459 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
460
461- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
462
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000463- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
464 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
465 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
466 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
467 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
468 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
469 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
470 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
471 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
472
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000473- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
474
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000475- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
476 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
477 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000478
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000479Tests
480-----
481
482- test__locale ported to unittest
483
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000484Mac
485---
486
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000487- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
488 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
489 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000490
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000491Tools/Demos
492-----------
493
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000494- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
495 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
496 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
497 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
498 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000499
500
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000501What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
502=================================
503
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000504*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000505
506Core and builtins
507-----------------
508
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000509- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000510 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
511
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000512- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
513 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
514 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
515 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
516 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
517 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
518 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
519 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000520 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
521 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
522 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
523 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
524 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000525
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000526- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
527 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
528 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
529 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
530 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
531
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000532- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
533
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000534- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
535 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
536
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000537- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
538 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
539 modified the list.
540
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000541- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
542 functions is now writable.
543
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000544- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
545 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
546 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
547 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
548
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000549- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
550 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
551 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
552 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
553 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000554
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000555- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
556 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
557
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000558Extension modules
559-----------------
560
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000561- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
562
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000563- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
564 data.
565
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000566- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
567 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
568 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
569 supposed to have been truncated away.
570
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000571- Added socket.socketpair().
572
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000573- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
574 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
575
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000576- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000577 versions of Python, have now been removed.
578
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000579Library
580-------
581
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000582- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000583 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000584
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000585- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
586 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
587
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000588- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
589 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
590
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000591- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
592
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000593- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
594 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000595
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000596- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
597 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
598
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000599- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
600
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000601- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
602
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000603- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
604
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000605- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
606 Percivall.
607
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000608- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
609 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
610
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000611- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
612 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
613 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000614 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000615
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000616- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
617 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
618 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
619 and exponent.
620
621- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
622
623- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
624 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
625 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
626
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000627- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
628 to the readline module.
629
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000630- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000631 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
632 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000633
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000634- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
635 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
636 contains symlinks.
637
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000638- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
639 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
640
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000641- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
642 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
643 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
644
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000645- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
646 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
647 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
648 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
649 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
650 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
651 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
652 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
653 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
654 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
655 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
656 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
657 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
658
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000659- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
660
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000661Tools/Demos
662-----------
663
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000664- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
665 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
666
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000667- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
668
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000669Build
670-----
671
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000672- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
673 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
674 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
675 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
676 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
677 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
678 plans to do so.
679
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000680- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
681 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
682
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000683- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
684 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
685
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000686- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
687 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
688
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000689- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
690 GNU/k*BSD systems.
691
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000692- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
693 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
694
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000695C API
696-----
697
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000698..
699
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000700Documentation
701-------------
702
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000703- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
704 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
705
706- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
707 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
708 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000709
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000710New platforms
711-------------
712
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000713- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
714
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000715Tests
716-----
717
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000718..
719
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000720Windows
721-------
722
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000723- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
724 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
725 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
726 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
727 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
728 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
729 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
730 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
731 the problem.
732
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000733Mac
734---
735
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000736..
737
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000738
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000739What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
740=================================
741
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000742*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000743
744Core and builtins
745-----------------
746
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000747- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
748 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
749 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
750 sensitive code.
751
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000752- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000753 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000754
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000755 @staticmethod
756 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000757
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000758 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000759
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000760- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
761 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
762 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
763 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
764 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
765 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
766 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
767 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
768 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
769 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
770 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
771
772 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
773 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
774 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
775 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
776 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
777 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
778 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
779
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000780- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
781 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
782
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000783- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000784 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000785
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000786- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000787 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000788 which was missing for no apparent reason.
789
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000790- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000791 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
792 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
793
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000794- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
795 types that support garbage collection.
796
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000797- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
798
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000799- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
800 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
801 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
802 Jython.
803
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000804- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
805
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000806- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
807 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
808
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000809- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
810 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
811 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000812
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000813- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
814 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
815 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
816
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000817Extension modules
818-----------------
819
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000820- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
821
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000822Library
823-------
824
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000825- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
826 TIS-620
827
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000828- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
829 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
830 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
831 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
832 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
833 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
834 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
835 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
836 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
837 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
838
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000839- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
840
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000841- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
842 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
843 same as when the argument is omitted).
844 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
845
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000846- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
847
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000848- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
849 schemes are offered.
850
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000851- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
852
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000853- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
854 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
855 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
856
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000857- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
858
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000859- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
860 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
861
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000862- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
863 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
864 when dummy_threading is being used.
865
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000866- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
867 from a tarfile.
868
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000869- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000870 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000871
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000872- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
873 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
874 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
875 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
876
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000877- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
878 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
879
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000880- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
881 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
882 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
883 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
884 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
885 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
886 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
887 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
888 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
889 by some other method in progress).
890
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000891- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
892 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
893 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000894
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000895- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
896
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000897- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
898 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
899 AM Kuchling.
900
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000901- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
902 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
903 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
904
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000905- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
906 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
907 instead of unsigned.
908
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000909- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000910 no longer part of the public API.
911
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000912- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
913 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
914 string methods of the same name).
915
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000916- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000917 SF patch 945642.
918
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000919- doctest unittest integration improvements:
920
921 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
922
923 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
924 DocTestSuites.
925
926- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
927 that provide thread-local data.
928
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000929- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
930 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
931
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000932- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
933
934- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
935 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
936 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
937
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000938- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
939
940 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
941 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
942 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000943
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000944 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
945 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
946 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
947 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
948
949 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
950 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
951
952 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
953 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
954 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
955 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
956
957 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
958 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
959 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
960 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
961 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
962
963 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
964 wrapping help output.
965
966 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
967 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
968 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000969
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000970C API
971-----
972
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000973- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
974 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
975 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
976 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
977 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
978 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
979 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
980 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
981 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
982 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
983 its visible semantics have not changed.
984
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000985- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
986 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
987
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000988Documentation
989-------------
990
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000991- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000992
993 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +0000994 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000995
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +0000996 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000997
998 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
999
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001000- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001001
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001002Tests
1003-----
1004
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001005- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001006 platforms that use the Makefile.
1007
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001008- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1009 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1010 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1011
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001012
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001013What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1014=================================
1015
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001016*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001017
1018Core and builtins
1019-----------------
1020
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001021- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1022 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1023 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1024 objects now (one object instead of three).
1025
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001026- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1027 Windows DLLs.
1028
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001029- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1030 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001031
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001032- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1033 a new .pyc magic.
1034
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001035- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1036 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1037 be there.
1038
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001039- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1040 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1041 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1042
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001043- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1044 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1045 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1046
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001047- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1048
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001049- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1050 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1051 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001052
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001053- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1054 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1055
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001056- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1057
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001058- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001059 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001060
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001061- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1062
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001063- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1064
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001065- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1066 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1067
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001068- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1069 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1070 Fixes bug #858016 .
1071
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001072- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1073 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1074 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1075
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001076- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1077 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1078 improves their performance (about 35%).
1079
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001080- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1081 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1082 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1083
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001084- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1085 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1086 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1087 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1088
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001089- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1090 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
1091 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
1092 length is not known).
1093
1094- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1095 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001096 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1097 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001098 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1099
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001100- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1101 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1102
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001103- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1104 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1105 keyword arguments.
1106
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001107- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1108 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1109 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1110
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001111- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1112 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1113 cases.
1114
1115- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1116 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1117 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1118 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1119 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1120 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1121 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1122 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1123 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1124 a release build.
1125
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001126- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1127 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1128
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001129- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001130 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001131
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001132- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1133 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1134 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1135 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1136 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1137 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1138 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1139 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1140 destroyed.
1141
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001142- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1143 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1144 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1145 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1146 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1147 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1148 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1149 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1150
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001151- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1152 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1153 character other than a space.
1154
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001155- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1156 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1157 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1158 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1159 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1160 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1161 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1162 attributes with the same name.
1163
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001164- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1165 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1166 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1167 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1168 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1169 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1170 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1171 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1172 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1173 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1174 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1175 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1176 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1177 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001178
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001179- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1180 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1181 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1182 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1183 This has been repaired.
1184
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001185- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1186
1187- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1188
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001189- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1190 over a sequence.
1191
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001192- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001193 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001194
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001195- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1196
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001197- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1198 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1199 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1200 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1201 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1202 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1203 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1204 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1205
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001206- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1207 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1208 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1209
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001210- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1211 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1212 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1213 freelist.
1214
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001215- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1216 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1217
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001218- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1219 number.
1220
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001221- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1222 a TypeError exception.
1223
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001224- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1225 820195.
1226
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001227- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1228 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1229 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1230
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001231- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001232 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1233 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001234
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001235- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1236 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1237 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1238
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001239- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1240 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001241 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001242
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001243- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001244 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1245 the first call.
1246
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001247
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001248Extension modules
1249-----------------
1250
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001251- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1252 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1253
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001254- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1255 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1256 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1257 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1258 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1259 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1260 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001261
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001262- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1263
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001264- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1265
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001266- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1267 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1268
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001269- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1270 fewer false positives.
1271
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001272- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1273 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1274
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001275- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001276 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1277
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001278- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001279 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001280 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001281 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1282 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001283
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001284- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1285 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1286 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1287 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1288
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001289- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1290 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1291 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1292 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1293 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1294 #897625.
1295
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001296- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1297 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1298
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001299- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1300 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1301 and pops on either side of the deque.
1302
1303- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1304 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1305
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001306- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1307 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1308 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1309 other functions that expect a function argument.
1310
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001311- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1312
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001313- os.getsid was added.
1314
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001315- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1316 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1317 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1318
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001319- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1320
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001321- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1322
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001323- readline.clear_history was added.
1324
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001325- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1326
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001327- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1328
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001329- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1330
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001331- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1332
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001333- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1334
1335- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1336
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001337- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1338
1339- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1340
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001341- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1342 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1343 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1344
1345- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1346 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1347 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1348 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1349 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1350 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1351 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1352
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001353- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1354 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1355 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1356 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001357
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001358- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001359 iterators from a single iterable.
1360
1361- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1362 of raising a TypeError exception.
1363
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001364- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1365 as parameter.
1366
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001367Library
1368-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001369
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001370- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1371 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1372 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001373
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001374- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1375 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1376 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001377
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001378- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001379
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001380- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1381 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001382
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001383- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1384 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1385
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001386- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1387
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001388- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001389 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001390
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001391- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001392 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001393
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001394- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1395
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001396- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1397 on cygwin and mingw32.
1398
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001399- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1400
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001401- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1402 module.
1403
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001404- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1405 installation scheme for all platforms.
1406
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001407- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001408 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001409
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001410- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1411 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1412 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1413
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001414- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1415 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1416 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1417
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001418- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1419
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001420- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1421
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001422- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1423 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1424
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001425- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1426 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1427 type pattern with the same value exists.
1428
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001429- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1430 when run from the command prompt).
1431
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001432- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1433 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1434
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001435- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1436 default sort).
1437
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001438- Added global runctx function to profile module
1439
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001440- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1441
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001442- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1443
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001444- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1445
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001446- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001447 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1448 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1449 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1450 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1451 accordingly.
1452
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001453- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1454 decoding standards.
1455
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001456- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1457 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1458 called for all requests.
1459
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001460- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1461 they are passed to the compiler.
1462
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001463- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1464 indent, width and depth.
1465
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001466- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1467 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1468
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001469- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1470 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1471
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001472- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1473
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001474- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1475
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001476- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1477
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001478- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1479 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1480
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001481- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001482 for better performance.
1483
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001484- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001485
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001486- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1487 a string).
1488
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001489- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1490
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001491- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1492
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001493- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1494
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001495- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1496
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001497- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1498 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1499 list of fieldnames.
1500
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001501- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1502 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1503
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001504- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1505
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001506- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1507 empty lists.
1508
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001509- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1510 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1511 and shelves.
1512
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001513- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1514 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1515
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001516- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001517 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1518 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001519
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001520- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1521 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001522 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001523
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001524- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001525 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1526 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1527
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001528- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1529 and removed in Py2.4.
1530
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001531- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1532
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001533- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1534
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001535Tools/Demos
1536-----------
1537
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001538- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1539 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1540
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001541- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1542
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001543- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1544 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1545 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1546 destination in situations where both files are given.
1547
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001548- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1549 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1550 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1551 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1552
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001553- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1554
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001555- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1556 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1557 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1558 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1559 now.
1560
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001561- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1562 in effect
1563
1564- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1565 C-c C-h
1566
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001567- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1568 -d option was given.
1569
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001570Build
1571-----
1572
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001573- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1574 build under OS X.
1575
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001576- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1577 --enable-profiling.
1578
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001579- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1580 is configured --with-tsc.
1581
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001582- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1583 on AMD64.
1584
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001585- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1586 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1587
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001588- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1589 removed.
1590
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001591- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1592 supported (see PEP 11).
1593
1594- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1595
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001596- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1597
1598- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1599 (see PEP 11).
1600
1601- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1602 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1603
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001604C API
1605-----
1606
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001607- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1608 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1609 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1610
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001611- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1612 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1613 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1614 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1615
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001616- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1617 generator objects.
1618
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001619- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1620 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001621 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1622 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001623
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001624- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1625 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1626
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001627- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1628 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1629 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1630 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1631 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1632
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001633- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1634 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1635 about 10% faster.
1636
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001637- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1638 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1639
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001640- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1641 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1642 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1643 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1644
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001645Windows
1646-------
1647
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001648- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1649 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1650 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1651 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1652
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001653- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1654 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1655 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1656
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001657
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001658What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1659===============================
1660
1661*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1662
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001663IDLE
1664----
1665
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001666- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1667 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1668 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1669 context-menu actions.
1670
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001671- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1672 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1673 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1674 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1675 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1676 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1677 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1678 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1679 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1680
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001681
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001682What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1683=============================================
1684
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001685*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001686
1687Core and builtins
1688-----------------
1689
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001690- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001691 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001692 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1693
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001694Extension modules
1695-----------------
1696
1697- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1698 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1699 than once. This has been fixed.
1700
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001701- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1702 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1703 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1704 call.
1705
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001706- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1707
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001708Library
1709-------
1710
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001711- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1712 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1713
1714- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1715 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1716 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1717 restored.
1718
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001719IDLE
1720----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001721
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001722- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001723
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001724Build
1725-----
1726
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001727- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1728 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1729
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001730C API
1731-----
1732
1733Windows
1734-------
1735
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001736- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1737 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1738
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001739- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1740
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001741Mac
1742---
1743
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001744- Various fixes to pimp.
1745
1746- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1747
1748- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1749 more problems than it solves.
1750
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001751
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001752What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1753=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001754
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001755*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1756
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001757Core and builtins
1758-----------------
1759
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001760- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1761 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1762
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001763- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1764 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001765 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001766
1767- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1768 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1769 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001770 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001771
1772- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1773 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001774
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001775- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1776 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1777 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1778
1779- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001780 770247.
1781
1782- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001783
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001784Extension modules
1785-----------------
1786
1787- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1788 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1789
1790- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1791
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001792- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1793
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001794- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1795 contained within the _strptime module.
1796
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001797- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1798 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1799
1800- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001801 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1802
1803- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1804 the find_class attribute, if present.
1805
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001806- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001807
1808 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1809 (SF bug 763298).
1810
1811 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001812 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1813 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1814 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001815
1816 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1817
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001818Library
1819-------
1820
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001821- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1822
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001823- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1824 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1825 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1826 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1827 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1828 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1829 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1830 or Tester().
1831
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001832- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1833 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1834 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1835 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1836 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1837 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1838 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1839 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1840 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001841
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001842 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001843
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001844- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1845 weren't before was an oversight.
1846
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001847- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1848 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1849
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001850- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1851 when there are no lines.
1852
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001853- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1854 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1855
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001856- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1857 to child processes.
1858
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001859- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1860
1861- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1862
1863- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1864 xmlrpclib.
1865
1866- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1867 responses.
1868
1869- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1870 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1871
1872- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1873 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1874 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1875
1876- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1877 used as patterns.
1878
1879- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1880 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1881 than Tk 8.3.
1882
1883- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1884
1885- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001886
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001887Tools/Demos
1888-----------
1889
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001890- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1891
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001892- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1893
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001894- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001895
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001896Build
1897-----
1898
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001899- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1900
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001901- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1902
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001903- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1904 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001905
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001906- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1907 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1908 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001909
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001910C API
1911-----
1912
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001913- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1914 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1915
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001916Windows
1917-------
1918
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001919- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1920 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1921 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1922 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1923 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1924 Python exception ::
1925
1926 thread.error: can't start new thread
1927
1928 is raised now.
1929
1930- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1931 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1932 instead of from DLL teardown.
1933
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001934Mac
1935---
1936
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001937- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001938 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001939 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1940 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1941 the executable in the bundle.
1942
1943- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001944
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001945- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1946
1947- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1948 on Panther.
1949
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001950What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1951================================
1952
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001953*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001954
1955Core and builtins
1956-----------------
1957
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001958- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1959 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1960 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1961 with the -i option.
1962
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001963- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1964 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1965
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001966- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1967 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1968
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001969- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1970 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1971 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1972 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1973 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1974 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1975 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1976 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1977 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1978 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1979 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1980 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1981 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001982
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001983- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1984 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1985 embedded in a lambda expression.
1986
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001987- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1988 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1989 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1990 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1991 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1992
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001993- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1994 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1995 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1996
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001997- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1998 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1999
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002000- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2001 It's writable again.
2002
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002003- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2004 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2005 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002006 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002007
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002008- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2009 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2010 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2011
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002012Extension modules
2013-----------------
2014
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002015- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2016 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2017
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002018- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2019 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2020 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2021 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2022
2023- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2024 collection.
2025
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002026- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2027 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2028 unique within a single program run.
2029
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002030- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2031 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2032
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002033- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2034 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2035
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002036- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2037 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002038
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002039- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2040
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002041- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2042 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2043
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002044- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2045 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2046 for many BSD-derived systems.
2047
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002048
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002049Library
2050-------
2051
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002052- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2053 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2054 primary ones:
2055
2056 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2057 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2058 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2059
2060 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2061 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2062 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2063 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2064 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2065 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2066
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002067- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2068 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2069 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2070 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2071 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2072 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2073 argument.
2074
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002075- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2076 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2077 in the archive.
2078
2079- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2080 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2081
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002082- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2083 569574).
2084
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002085- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2086 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2087 no more.
2088
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002089- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2090 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2091 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2092 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2093 code coverage.
2094
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002095- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2096 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2097 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002098 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2099 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002100
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002101- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2102 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2103 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002104 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002105
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002106- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2107
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002108- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2109 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2110 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2111 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2112
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002113- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2114 handling.
2115
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002116- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2117 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2118
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002119- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2120 in socket.py.
2121
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002122- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2123
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002124- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2125 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2126 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2127 opener with proxy support.
2128
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002129- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2130
2131- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2132
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002133Tools/Demos
2134-----------
2135
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002136- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2137
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002138- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2139
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002140- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2141 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002142
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002143- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2144 files.
2145
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002146Build
2147-----
2148
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002149- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002150 different root directory.
2151
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002152C API
2153-----
2154
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002155- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2156 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2157 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2158 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2159 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2160 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2161 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2162 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2163 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2164 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2165
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002166- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2167 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2168 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2169 from Python.
2170
2171
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002172New platforms
2173-------------
2174
2175None this time.
2176
2177Tests
2178-----
2179
2180- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2181 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2182
2183Windows
2184-------
2185
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002186- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2187
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002188- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2189 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2190 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2191 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2192 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2193 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2194 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2195 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2196 that's what it's for.
2197
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002198Mac
2199---
2200
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002201- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2202 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2203 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2204 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002205- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2206 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2207- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002208
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002209SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2210------------------------------------
2211
2212430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2213598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2214622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2215661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2216683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2217697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2218713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2219724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2220727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2221729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2222730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2223731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2224732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2225733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2226735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2227740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2228744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2229745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2230747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2231749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2232751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2233753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2234755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2235757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2236760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2237
2238
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002239What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2240================================
2241
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002242*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002243
2244Core and builtins
2245-----------------
2246
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002247- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2248 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2249
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002250- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2251 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2252 and cannot be strings).
2253
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002254- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2255 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2256 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2257 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2258
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002259- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2260 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2261 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2262 Python itself.
2263
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002264- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2265 the referenced object, if it has one.
2266
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002267- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2268 the thread started at
2269 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2270
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002271- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2272 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2273 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2274 placed on a list index.
2275
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002276- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2277 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2278 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2279 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2280
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002281- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2282 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2283 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2284 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2285 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2286 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2287 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2288
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002289- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2290 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2291 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2292 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2293 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2294
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002295- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2296 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002297
2298- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2299 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2300 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2301 #693195.)
2302
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002303- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2304 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002305
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002306- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002307 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002308 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2309 interpreter executions, would fail.
2310
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002311- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002312 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002313 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002314
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002315Extension modules
2316-----------------
2317
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002318- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2319 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2320 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2321 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2322
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002323- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2324 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2325
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002326- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2327 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2328 and Greg Chapman.)
2329
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002330- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2331 recursively.
2332
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002333- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002334 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2335 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2336 leaks.
2337
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002338- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2339
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002340- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2341 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2342 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2343 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2344 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2345 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2346 #705836.
2347
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002348- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002349 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2350
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002351- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2352 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2353 See SF bug #692416.
2354
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002355- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2356 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2357
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002358- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2359 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2360 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002361
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002362- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002363 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2364 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2365
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002366- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2367 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2368 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2369 timeouts to work properly.
2370
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002371Library
2372-------
2373
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002374- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2375 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2376 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2377 future release.
2378
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002379- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2380 for querying platform dependent features.
2381
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002382- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002383
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002384- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2385 pickle protocol versions.
2386
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002387- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2388 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2389 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2390
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002391- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2392
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002393- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2394 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2395 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2396 modules.
2397
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002398- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2399 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2400 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2401
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002402- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2403 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2404
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002405- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2406 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2407 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2408
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002409- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002410 MS Office extensions.
2411
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002412- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2413 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2414
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002415- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2416 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2417
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002418- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2419 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2420 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2421 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2422 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2423 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2424
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002425- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2426 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2427 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002428
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002429- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2430 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2431 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2432
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002433- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2434
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002435- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2436 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2437 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2438
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002439Tools/Demos
2440-----------
2441
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002442- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2443 See the module docstring for details.
2444
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002445Build
2446-----
2447
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002448- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2449 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002450
2451C API
2452-----
2453
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002454- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2455
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002456- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2457 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2458 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2459
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002460- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2461 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002462
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002463 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2464 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2465 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002466
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002467- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002468 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2469
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002470- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2471 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2472 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002473
2474New platforms
2475-------------
2476
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002477None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002478
2479Tests
2480-----
2481
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002482- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2483 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002484
2485Windows
2486-------
2487
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002488- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2489 function.
2490
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002491- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2492 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002493
2494Mac
2495---
2496
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002497- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2498 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002499
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002500- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2501 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002502
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002503- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2504 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2505 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002506
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002507- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002508 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2509 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002510
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002511- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2512 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002513
2514
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002515What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2516=================================
2517
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002518*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002519
2520Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002521-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002522
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002523- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2524 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2525 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2526
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002527- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2528 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2529 (SF patch #664376.)
2530
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002531- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2532 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2533 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2534 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2535 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2536 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002537 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002538
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002539- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2540 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2541 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2542 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002543 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002544
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002545- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2546 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2547 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2548 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2549 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2550 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2551 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2552 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2553 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2554 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2555 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2556
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002557- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2558 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2559 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2560 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2561 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2562 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2563
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002564- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2565 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2566
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002567- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2568 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2569 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2570 case.)
2571
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002572- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2573 passed as unicode strings.
2574
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002575- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2576 See SF bug #683467.
2577
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002578- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2579 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2580
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002581- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2582
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002583- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2584
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002585- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2586 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2587 arguments.
2588
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002589- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2590 See SF bug #667147.
2591
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002592- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002593 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002594 See SF bug #676155.
2595
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002596- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002597 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002598 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2599 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2600 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2601 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2602 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2603 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002604
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002605Extension modules
2606-----------------
2607
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002608- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2609 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2610 tp_as_number pointer.
2611
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002612- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2613 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2614 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2615 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2616 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2617
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002618- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2619
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002620- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2621
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002622- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002623 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002624 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2625 patch #678531.)
2626
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002627- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2628 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2629
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002630- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2631 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2632
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002633- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2634
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002635- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2636 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2637 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2638
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002639- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2640
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002641- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2642 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2643
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002644- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002645
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002646- datetime changes:
2647
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002648 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2649
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002650 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2651 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2652 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2653 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2654 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2655 now.
2656
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002657 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002658 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2659 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002660
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002661 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002662 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002663 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2664 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2665 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2666 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002667
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002668 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2669 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2670 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002671 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2672
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002673 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2674 by a later example coded by Guido.
2675
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002676 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002677 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2678 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2679 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002680 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2681 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2682
2683 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2684 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2685 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2686 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2687 tzinfo subclass instance.
2688
2689 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2690 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2691 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2692 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2693 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2694 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2695 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2696 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002697
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002698 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2699 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2700 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2701 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2702 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002703 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2704
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002705 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002706
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002707 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2708 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2709 as a naive datetime object.
2710
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002711 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2712 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2713 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2714
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002715 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2716 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2717 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2718 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2719 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2720 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2721 comparison.
2722
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002723 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2724 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2725 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2726 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002727 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002728
2729 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002730
2731 and ::
2732
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002733 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2734
2735 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2736 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2737 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2738 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2739
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002740 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2741 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2742 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2743 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2744 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2745
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002746 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2747 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002748 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2749 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002750
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002751Library
2752-------
2753
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002754- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2755 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2756
2757- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2758 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2759 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2760 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2761 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2762 See PEP 307 for details.
2763
2764- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2765 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2766
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002767- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2768 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002769 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002770 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2771 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002772 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002773
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002774- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2775 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2776
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002777- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2778 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2779 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2780
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002781- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2782
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002783- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2784 exception.
2785
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002786- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2787 class.
2788
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002789- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2790 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2791 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2792
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002793- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2794 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2795
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002796- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002797 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2798 See SF bug #659228.
2799
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002800- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2801 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2802 See SF patch #651082.
2803
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002804- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002805
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002806- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2807 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2808
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002809- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002810 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002811
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002812- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2813 DOS paths from other platforms.
2814
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002815Tools/Demos
2816-----------
2817
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002818- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2819 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2820 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2821 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2822 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2823 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2824 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2825 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2826 example:
2827
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002828 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2829 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002830
2831 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2832
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002833
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002834Build
2835-----
2836
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002837- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2838 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2839 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002840 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2841
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002842 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2843
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002844- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2845 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2846 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2847 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2848 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2849 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2850 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2851 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2852 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2853
2854- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2855 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2856 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2857 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2858
2859- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2860 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2861
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002862C API
2863-----
2864
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002865- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2866 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002867
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002868- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2869 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2870 tp_as_number pointer.
2871
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002872- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2873 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2874 (SF #681367)
2875
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002876- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2877 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2878 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2879 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002880
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002881Tests
2882-----
2883
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002884- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002885 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2886 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2887 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2888 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2889 pydoc.)
2890
2891- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2892
2893- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002894
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002895Windows
2896-------
2897
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002898- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2899 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2900 time).
2901
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002902- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2903 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2904
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002905- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2906 release without strong cryptography.
2907
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002908- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002909 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002910
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002911- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2912 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2913
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002914Mac
2915---
2916
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002917- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2918 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002919
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002920- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2921 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2922 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002923
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002924- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2925 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002926
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002927- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2928 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2929 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2930 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002931
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002932- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002933 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2934 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2935 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002936
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002937
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002938What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002939=================================
2940
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002941*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002942
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002943Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002944--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002945
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002946- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2947
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002948- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2949 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002950 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002951 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002952 a different meaning than before.
2953
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002954- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002955 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002956 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002957
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002958- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002959 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002960 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002961
2962- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2963 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2964 and deallocation.
2965
2966- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2967 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2968
2969- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2970 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2971 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2972 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2973 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2974
2975- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2976 now detected by the garbage collector.
2977
2978- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2979 [SF bug 519621]
2980
2981- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2982 identifier.
2983
2984- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2985 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2986 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2987 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2988 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2989 [SF bug 563060]
2990
2991- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2992 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2993 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2994 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2995 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2996
2997- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2998 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2999 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3000
3001- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3002
3003- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3004 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3005 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3006 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3007 state of the slots would be lost.)
3008
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003009Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003010-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003011
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003012- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003013 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3014 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3015 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3016 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003017 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3018 Jython 2.1.
3019
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003020- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003021 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003022 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3023 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3024 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3025 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3026 these, see PEP 302.
3027
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003028- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3029 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3030 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3031
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003032- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3033 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3034 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3035
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003036- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3037 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3038 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3039
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003040- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3041 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3042 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3043 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3044 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3045 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3046 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3047 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3048 releases or implementations.
3049
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003050- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003051 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3052 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003053
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003054- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3055 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3056
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003057- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3058 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3059 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3060
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003061- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3062 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3063
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003064- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3065 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003066 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3067 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003068
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003069- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3070 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3071 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3072 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3073 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3074
3075 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3076 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3077 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3078 pattern.
3079
3080 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3081 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3082 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3083 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3084
3085 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3086 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3087 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3088 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3089 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3090 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3091
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003092- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3093 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3094 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3095 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3096 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3097 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3098 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3099 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003100
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003101- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3102 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3103 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3104 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3105 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003106 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3107 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3108 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3109 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3110 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3111 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3112 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003113
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003114- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3115 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3116
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003117- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3118 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3119 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3120 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3121 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3122 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3123 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3124 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3125 to Zack Weinberg!
3126
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003127- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3128 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3129 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3130 type. This has been fixed now.
3131
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003132- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3133 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3134 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3135
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003136- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3137 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3138 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3139 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3140 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3141 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3142 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3143 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003144 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003145
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003146- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3147 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3148 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003149
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003150- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3151 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3152 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3153 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3154 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3155 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3156 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3157 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003158 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003159 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3160 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3161
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003162- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3163 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3164 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3165 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3166 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3167 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3168 this.)
3169
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003170- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3171 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003172 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003173 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003174 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3175 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003176 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3177 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003178
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003179- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3180 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3181 currently running.
3182
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003183- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3184 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3185 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3186 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3187
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003188- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3189 as directory names.
3190
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003191- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3192 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3193
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003194- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3195 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3196
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003197- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003198 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3199 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003200
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003201- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3202 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3203 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3204 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3205 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3206
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003207- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3208 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3209 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3210 removed.
3211
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003212- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3213 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3214 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3215
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003216- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3217 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3218 to __debug__.
3219
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003220- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3221 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3222 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3223
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003224- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3225 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3226 deprecated now.
3227
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003228- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3229 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3230 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003231
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003232- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3233 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3234 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3235 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3236 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003237
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003238- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3239 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3240
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003241- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3242 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3243 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003244 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003245 is backward compatible.
3246
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003247- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3248 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3249 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3250 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3251 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3252
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003253- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3254 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3255 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3256 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3257 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3258 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003259
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003260- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3261 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3262
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003263- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3264 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3265
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003266- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3267 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3268 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3269 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3270 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3271
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003272- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3273 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3274 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3275
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003276- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003277 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3278
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003279- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3280 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3281 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003282
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003283- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3284 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3285
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003286- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3287 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3288 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3289
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003290- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3291
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003292Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003293-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003294
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003295- Added three operators to the operator module:
3296 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3297 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3298 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3299
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003300- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3301
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003302- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3303 archives.
3304
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003305- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3306 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3307 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3308
3309 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3310
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003311- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3312 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3313 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003314 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003315
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003316- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3317 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3318 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3319 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003320 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3321 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3322 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3323 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003324
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003325- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3326 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003327
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003328- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3329
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003330- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3331 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3332
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003333- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3334 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3335 supported.
3336
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003337- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3338
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003339- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3340 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003341
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003342- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3343 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3344
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003345- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3346
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003347- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3348 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3349
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003350- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3351 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3352 functions but callable type objects.
3353
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003354- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003355 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003356 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003357
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003358- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3359 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003360
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003361- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3362 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003363
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003364- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3365 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3366 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3367 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3368
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003369- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3370 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003371
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003372- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3373 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3374 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3375 and __imul__.
3376
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003377- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003378 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3379 is called.
3380
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003381- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3382 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3383 interpreter was compiled.
3384
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003385- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3386 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3387 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003388 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003389 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3390 1, not 2.
3391
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003392- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3393 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3394 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3395 limit.
3396
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003397- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3398 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3399 bug #623464.
3400
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003401- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3402 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3403 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3404 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3405
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003406Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003407-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003408
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003409- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3410
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003411- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3412 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3413 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3414 with Python 2.3a2.
3415
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003416- os.path exposes getctime.
3417
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003418- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003419 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003420 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003421 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003422 unit tests of floating point results.
3423
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003424- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3425 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3426 has been increased.
3427
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003428- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3429 executed.
3430
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003431- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3432 postinstallation script.
3433
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003434- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3435 test the current module.
3436
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003437- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003438 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3439 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3440 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3441 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3442
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003443- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003444 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003445 Ward's Optik package.
3446
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003447- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3448 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3449 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3450 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3451
3452- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3453 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003454 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003455
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003456- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3457 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3458 shelf are binary pickles.
3459
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003460- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3461 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3462
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003463- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3464 modules are iterators now.
3465
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003466- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3467 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3468 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3469 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3470 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3471 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003472
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003473- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3474 with their entity value.
3475
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003476- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3477
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003478- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3479 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003480
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003481- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3482 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003483 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003484
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003485- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3486 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3487 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3488 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3489 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3490 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3491 main():
3492
3493 import locale
3494 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3495
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003496- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3497 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3498
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003499- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3500 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3501 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3502 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3503 to the new standard.
3504
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003505- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3506 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3507 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3508 an extension to the database.
3509
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003510- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3511 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3512 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3513 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003514 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003515
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003516- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003517 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003518
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003519- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3520 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3521 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3522 bounded integers.
3523
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003524- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3525 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3526 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3527 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3528 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3529 in existence.
3530
3531 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3532 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3533 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3534 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3535 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3536 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3537
3538 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3539 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3540 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3541 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3542
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003543- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3544 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3545 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3546
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003547- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3548
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003549- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3550 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3551 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3552 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3553
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003554- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3555 argument.
3556
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003557- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3558 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3559 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3560 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3561 [SF patch 560794].
3562
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003563- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3564 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3565 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003566 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3567 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3568 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003569
3570- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3571 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003572
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003573- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3574 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3575 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3576 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003577
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003578- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3579 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3580 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3581 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3582 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3583
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003584- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003585
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003586- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3587
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003588- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3589 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3590 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3591 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3592 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3593 identical to None.
3594
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003595- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3596 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3597 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3598 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3599 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3600 results now.
3601
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003602- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3603 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3604
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003605- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3606 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3607 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3608 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3609 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3610 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3611 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3612 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3613
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003614- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3615
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003616- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3617 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3618
3619- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3620 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3621 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3622 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3623 and other systems.
3624
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003625- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3626 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3627 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3628 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 +00003629 work well with these.
3630
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003631- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3632
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003633- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003634 connections.
3635
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003636- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3637 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3638 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3639
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003640- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3641 sets
3642
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003643- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3644 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3645 name.
3646
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003647- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3648 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3649 passed in.
3650
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003651- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003652 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003653 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3654 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003655
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003656- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3657
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003658- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3659
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003660- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3661 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3662 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3663
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003664- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3665 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3666 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3667 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003668 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003669
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003670- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003671 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003672 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003673
3674- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3675 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3676 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3677
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003678- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003679 the value of its expression argument.
3680
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003681- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3682 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3683 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3684
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003685- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3686 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3687 skipstone browser was included.
3688
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003689- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3690 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3691
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003692Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003693-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003694
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003695- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3696 names in addition to accepting file names.
3697
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003698- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3699 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3700 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3701 still used and useful.)
3702
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003703- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3704 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3705 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3706 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003707
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003708- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3709 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3710 the generated binary.
3711
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003712Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003713-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003714
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003715- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3716
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003717- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3718 except in the hands of experts.
3719
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003720- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003721 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3722 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3723 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003724
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003725- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3726 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3727 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3728 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3729 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3730 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3731 builds.
3732
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003733- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3734 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3735 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3736 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3737 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3738 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3739 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3740 new type.
3741
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003742- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003743
3744 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3745 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3746 positive infinities.
3747
3748 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3749 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3750 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3751 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3752 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3753 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3754 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3755
3756 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3757
3758 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3759
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003760- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3761 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3762 size of the executable.
3763
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003764- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3765 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3766 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3767 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003768
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003769- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3770
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003771- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3772 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3773 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003774
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003775- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3776 well as Unix.
3777
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003778- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3779 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3780 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3781 modules in the README file for details.
3782
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003783C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003784-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003785
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003786- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3787 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003788 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003789 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003790 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003791
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003792- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3793 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3794 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3795 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3796 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3797 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003798 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003799 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3800 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3801 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3802 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3803 aligned.)
3804
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003805- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3806 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3807 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3808
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003809- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3810 level.
3811
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003812- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3813 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3814 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3815 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3816 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3817
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003818- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3819 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3820 code.
3821
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003822- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3823 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3824 adjusting for negative indices.
3825
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003826- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3827 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3828 object.
3829
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003830- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3831 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3832 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3833
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003834- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3835 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003836
3837- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3838
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003839- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3840 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3841 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3842 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3843
3844- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3845
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003846- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003847
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003848- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003849 without going through the buffer API.
3850
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003851- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003852
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003853- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3854 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3855 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3856 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3857
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003858- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3859 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3860
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003861- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003862 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3863
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003864New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003865-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003866
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003867- OpenVMS is now supported.
3868
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003869- AtheOS is now supported.
3870
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003871- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3872
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003873- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3874
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003875Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003876-----
3877
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003878- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3879 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3880 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003881
3882Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003883-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003884
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003885- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3886 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3887 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3888 bugs.
3889 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003890 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003891 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3892 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003893 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003894
3895- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003896 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003897
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003898- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3899 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3900
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003901- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3902 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003903 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003904 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3905
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003906- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3907 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3908 use files" uninstall option).
3909
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003910- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3911
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003912- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3913 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3914
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003915- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3916 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3917 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3918
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003919- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3920 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3921 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3922 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3923 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003924 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3925 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3926 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003927
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003928- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003929 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003930 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3931 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3932 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3933 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3934 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3935 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3936 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3937 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3938 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3939 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3940 work around.
3941
3942- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3943 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3944 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3945 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3946 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3947 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3948 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3949 specified with O_CREAT too).
3950
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003951Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003952----
3953
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003954- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003955
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003956- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3957 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3958 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3959
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003960- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3961 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3962 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3963
3964- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3965 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3966 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3967 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3968 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3969 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3970 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3971 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003972
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003973- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3974 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3975 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003976
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003977- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3978 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3979 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3980 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3981 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003982
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003983- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3984 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3985 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003986
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003987- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3988 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003989
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003990- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3991 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3992 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3993 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3994 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003995
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003996- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3997 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3998 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3999
4000- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4001 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4002 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004003
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004004- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4005 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4006 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4007 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004008 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004009
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004010- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4011 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004012
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004013- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4014 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004015
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004016- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004017 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004018 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4019 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004020
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004021
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004022What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004023===============================
4024
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004025*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4026
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004027Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004028--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004029
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004030- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4031 with a custom metaclass.
4032
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004033Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004034-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004035
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004036- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4037 are proxies.
4038
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004039Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004040-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004041
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004042- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4043 very short strings.
4044
4045- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4046 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4047 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4048 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4049 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4050
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004051Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004052-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004053
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004054- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4055 close or delete time).
4056
4057- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4058 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4059
4060- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4061
4062- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004063 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004064
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004065Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004066-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004067
4068Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004069-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004070
4071C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004072-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004073
4074New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004075-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004076
4077Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004078-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004079
4080Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004081-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004082
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004083- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4084
4085- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4086 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4087
4088- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4089 deleted at process exit time.
4090
4091- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4092 in backslash.
4093
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004094Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004095----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004096
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004097- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4098 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4099 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4100
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004101
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004102What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004103===========================
4104
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004105*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4106
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004107Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004108--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004109
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004110- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4111 been extensively updated. See
4112
4113 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4114
4115 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4116
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004117- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4118 deleted!
4119
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004120- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4121 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4122 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4123 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4124 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4125
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004126- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4127
4128 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4129 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4130
4131 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4132 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4133 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4134 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4135 supported anyway.
4136
4137 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4138 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4139
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004140- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4141 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4142 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4143 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4144 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004145
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004146- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4147 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4148 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4149
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004150Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004151-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004152
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004153- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4154 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4155 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4156 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4157 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4158 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004159 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4160 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4161 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4162 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004163
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004164- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4165 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4166 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4167
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004168Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004169-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004170
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004171- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4172
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004173Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004174-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004175
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004176- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4177 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4178 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4179 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4180 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4181 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4182
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004183- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4184
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004185- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4186
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004187- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4188
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004189- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4190 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4191 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4192
4193- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4194
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004195Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004196-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004197
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004198- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4199 off a search on Google.
4200
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004201Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004202-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004203
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004204- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4205 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4206 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4207 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4208 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4209 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4210 other platforms should do likewise.
4211
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004212- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4213 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4214 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4215
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004216C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004217-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004218
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004219- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4220 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4221 producing key-value pairs.
4222
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004223- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004224 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004225 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4226 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4227 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4228 previously went unchallenged.
4229
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004230New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004231-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004232
4233Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004234-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004235
4236Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004237-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004238
4239Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004240----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004241
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004242- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4243 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004244
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004245- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4246 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4247 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4248 home.
4249
4250
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004251What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004252===========================
4253
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004254*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4255
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004256Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004257--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004258
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004259- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4260 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004261
4262 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004263 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004264
4265 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4266 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004267 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004268 This needs to be documented.
4269
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004270- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4271 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4272
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004273- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4274 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4275 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4276
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004277- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4278 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4279
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004280- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4281 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4282 class forbids it).
4283
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004284- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4285 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4286 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4287
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004288- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4289
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004290Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004291-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004292
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004293- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4294 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004295 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004296
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004297- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4298 (like 1 + '').
4299
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004300Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004301-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004302
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004303- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4304 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4305 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4306 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004307 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004308 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4309
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004310- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4311 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4312 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4313 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4314
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004315- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4316 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004317 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4318 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4319 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004320
4321- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4322 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004323
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004324- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4325 bytes on its input.
4326
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004327Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004328-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004329
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004330- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004331 convenience function.
4332
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004333- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4334 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4335 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004336 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4337 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4338 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4339 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4340 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4341 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004342
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004343- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4344 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4345 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4346 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4347
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004348- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4349 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4350 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4351
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004352- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4353 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4354 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4355 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4356
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004357- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4358 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004359 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004360 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4361 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4362 new -l and -e options.
4363
4364- statcache is now deprecated.
4365
4366- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4367 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004368 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004369 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4370 time properly taken into account.
4371
4372- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4373 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4374 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4375 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4376
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004377Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004378-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004379
4380Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004381-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004382
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004383- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4384 is built with libdb3 if available.
4385
4386- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4387
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004388C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004389-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004390
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004391- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4392 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4393 PySequence_Size().
4394
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004395- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4396
4397- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4398 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4399 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4400
4401- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4402 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4403
4404- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4405 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4406
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004407New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004408-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004409
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004410- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4411 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4412
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004413- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4414 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4415
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004416- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4417
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004418Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004419-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004420
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004421- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4422 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4423
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004424Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004425-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004426
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004427Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004428----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004429
4430- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4431 removed completely in the next release.
4432
4433- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4434 OSX.
4435
4436- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4437 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4438
4439- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4440
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004441
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004442What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004443===========================
4444
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004445*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4446
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004447Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004448--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004449
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004450- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004451 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004452 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004453 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4454 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004455 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4456 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004457 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4458 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004459
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004460- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4461 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4462
4463- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4464 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4465
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004466Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004467-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004468
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004469- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4470 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4471 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4472 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4473 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4474 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4475 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4476 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4477
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004478- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4479 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4480 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4481 example).
4482
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004483- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004484 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004485 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004486 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004487
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004488- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4489 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4490 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004491 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004492
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004493- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4494 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4495 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4496 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4497 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4498 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4499
4500 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4501
4502 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4503
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004504Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004505-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004506
4507- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4508
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004509- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4510
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004511- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4512 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004513
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004514- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4515 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4516 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4517 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4518 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4519 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004520 attributes.
4521
4522- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4523 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4524 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004525
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004526- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4527 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4528 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004529
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004530- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4531 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4532 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004533 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4534 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4535
4536- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4537 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004538
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004539Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004540-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004541
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004542- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4543 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4544
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004545- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4546 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4547 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4548 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4549
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004550- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4551 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4552 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4553 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4554
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004555 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4556 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4557 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4558 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4559 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4560 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4561 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4562 without losing information).
4563
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004564- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004565 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4566 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4567 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4568 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4569 module).
4570
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004571 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004572 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4573 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4574 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4575 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004576
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004577- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004578 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4579 encoding.
4580
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004581- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4582 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4583
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004584- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004585 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4586
4587- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4588 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4589 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4590 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4591
4592- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4593
4594- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4595 ON, and OFF.
4596
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004597- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4598 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4599
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004600Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004601-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004602
4603- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4604 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4605 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004606
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004607- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4608 been added: -X and -E.
4609
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004610Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004611-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004612
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004613- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4614 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4615
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004616C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004617-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004618
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004619- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4620 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4621 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4622 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4623 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4624
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004625- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4626 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4627 as long) arguments.
4628
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004629- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4630 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4631 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4632 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4633 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4634 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4635
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004636- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4637 input.
4638
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004639New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004640-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004641
4642Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004643-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004644
4645Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004646-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004647
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004648- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4649 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4650 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4651
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004652- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4653 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4654 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004655 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004656
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004657 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4658 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4659 import signal
4660 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004661
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004662 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004663 while 1:
4664 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004665 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004666 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4667 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4668 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4669 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004670
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004671
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004672What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4673===========================
4674
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004675*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4676
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004677Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004678--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004679
4680- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4681 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4682 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4683
4684- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4685 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4686 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4687 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4688 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4689 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4690 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004691
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004692- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004693 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004694 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4695 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4696 associate a docstring with a property.
4697
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004698- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4699 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4700 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4701 other built-in object types.
4702
4703- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4704 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4705 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4706 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4707 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4708
4709- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4710 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4711
4712- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4713 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004714 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004715 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4716 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4717 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4718 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4719 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4720
4721- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4722 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4723 class.
4724
4725- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4726 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4727 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4728 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4729
4730- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4731 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4732 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4733 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4734
4735- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4736 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4737
4738- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4739 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4740 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4741 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4742 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004743 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004744 with the same value as s.
4745
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004746- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4747
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004748Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004749----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004750
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004751- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4752
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004753- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4754 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4755 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4756 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4757 objects.
4758
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004759- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4760 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004761 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4762 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4763
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004764- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4765 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4766 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4767
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004768Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004769-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004770
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004771- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4772 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4773 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4774 by the instances.
4775
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004776- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4777 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4778 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4779
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004780- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4781 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4782 before the entire comparison is complete.
4783
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004784- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4785 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4786 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4787
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004788- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4789 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4790 getwriter().
4791
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004792- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4793 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4794
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004795- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004796 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4797 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4798
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004799- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4800 iterable object.
4801
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004802- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4803 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004804
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004805- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4806 authentication.
4807
4808- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4809 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004810
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004811- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004812 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4813 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4814 a sample driver.)
4815
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004816Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004817-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004818
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004819- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4820 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4821 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4822 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4823 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4824 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4825 kernel has large file support.
4826
4827- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4828 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4829 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4830 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4831 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4832
4833- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4834 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4835 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4836
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004837C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004838-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004839
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004840- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4841 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4842
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004843New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004844-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004845
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004846- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4847 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4848
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004849Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004850-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004851
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004852- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4853 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4854 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4855 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4856 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4857
4858- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4859 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4860 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4861 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4862
4863- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4864 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4865
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004866Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004867-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004868
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004869- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004870 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4871 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004872
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004873
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004874What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4875===========================
4876
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004877*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4878
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004879Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004880----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004881
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004882- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4883 big to represent as a C double.
4884
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004885- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4886 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4887 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4888 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4889 restriction).
4890
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004891- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4892 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4893 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4894 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4895 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4896
4897 >>> dir([])
4898 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4899 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4900 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4901 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4902 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4903 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4904 'reverse', 'sort']
4905
4906 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4907
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004908- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004909 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4910 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4911 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4912 OverflowError exception.
4913
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004914- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004915 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004916 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4917 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4918 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4919 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4920 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004921 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004922 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4923 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4924
4925 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4926 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4927 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4928 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004929
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004930- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004931 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4932 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4933 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4934 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4935 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4936 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4937 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4938 once it is created.
4939
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004940- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4941 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4942 (key, value) pairs.
4943
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004944- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004945 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4946 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4947
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004948- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4949 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4950 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4951 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4952 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004953
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004954- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004955 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4956 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4957
4958 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4959
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004960- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004961 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4962
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004963Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004964-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004965
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004966- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004967 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4968 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004969
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004970- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4971 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4972 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4973 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4974 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4975 in this area anymore).
4976
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004977- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4978 threading.Timer.
4979
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004980- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4981 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4982
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004983- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004984 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4985
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004986- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004987 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4988 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4989 converted to Python longs.
4990
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004991- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004992 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4993
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004994- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4995 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4996 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4997
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004998Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004999-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005000
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005001- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5002 division operators as per PEP 238.
5003
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005004Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005005-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005006
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005007- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5008 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5009 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5010 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5011
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005012C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005013-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005014
5015- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005016
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005017- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5018 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005019 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005020
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005021 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5022 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005023 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005024 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005025
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005026- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005027 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5028 module:
5029
5030 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005031
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005032 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5033 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005034
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005035 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5036 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005037
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005038 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5039
5040 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5041
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005042- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005043 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5044 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5045 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005046
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005047New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005048-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005049
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005050- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5051 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5052 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5053 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5054 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005055
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005056Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005057-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005058
5059Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005060-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005061
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005062- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5063 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5064 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5065 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005066 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5067 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5068 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5069 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5070 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005071
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005072- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005073 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5074
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005075
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005076What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5077===========================
5078
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005079*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5080
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005081Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005082-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005083
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005084- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5085 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5086
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005087- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5088 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5089 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005090
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005091- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5092 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5093 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5094 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005095
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005096- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5097
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005098- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005099
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005100Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005101-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005102
5103- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005104 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005105 the module docstring for details.
5106
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005107Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005108-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005109
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005110- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005111 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5112 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5113 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005114
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005115- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5116 Nick Mathewson.
5117
5118Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005119----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005120
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005121- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5122 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5123 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5124 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5125 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5126 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5127 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5128 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5129
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005130- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5131 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5132 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5133 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5134
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005135- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5136 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5137 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5138 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5139 come a long way).
5140
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005141- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5142 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5143 write filters for these warnings).
5144
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005145- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5146 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5147 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5148 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5149 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5150
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005151- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5152 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5153 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5154 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5155 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5156 older distribution.
5157
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005158Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005159-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005160
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005161- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5162 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005163 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005164
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005165- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5166 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5167 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5168
5169- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5170
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005171- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5172
5173- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5174
5175- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5176
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005177- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005178
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005179- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5180
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005181New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005182-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005183
5184C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005185-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005186
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005187- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5188 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5189 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5190 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5191 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5192 against buffer overruns.
5193
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005194- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005195 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5196 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005197 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5198 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5199 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5200
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005201- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5202 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5203 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5204 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5205 deprecated.
5206
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005207Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005208-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005209
5210- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5211 relevant is found.
5212
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005213
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005214What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005215===========================
5216
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005217*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5218
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005219Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005220----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005221
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005222- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5223 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5224 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5225 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5226 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5227 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5228 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5229 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005230 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005231 repaired.
5232
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005233- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005234 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005235 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5236 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5237 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5238 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5239 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5240 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5241 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5242 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5243
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005244- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5245 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5246 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5247 leading BMO character).
5248
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005249- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5250 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5251 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5252
5253 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5254 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5255 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005256
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005257 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5258 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5259 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5260 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5261 for various simple to use conversions.
5262
5263 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5264 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5265
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005266 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5267 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5268 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5269 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5270 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5271 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5272 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5273 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5274 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5275 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5276 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5277 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5278 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5279 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5280 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005281
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005282- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5283 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5284 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005285 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005286 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005287
5288 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005289 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5290 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5291 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5292 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5293 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005294 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5295 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005296
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005297 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5298 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5299 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005300 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005301
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005302- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5303 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5304 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5305 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5306 floating arithmetic,
5307
5308 x = 9007199254740992.0
5309 print long(x)
5310
5311 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5312 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5313 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5314 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5315 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5316 functions are of good quality).
5317
5318 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5319 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5320 algorithms to break.
5321
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005322- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5323 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5324 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5325 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5326 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5327 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5328 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5329 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5330 order.
5331
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005332- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5333 operation along the most common code paths.
5334
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005335- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5336 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5337
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005338- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5339 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5340 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5341 {}.update(UserDict())
5342
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005343- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5344 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5345 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5346 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5347 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5348 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5349 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5350 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5351
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005352- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005353 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005354
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005355 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005356 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5357 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005358 join() method of strings
5359 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005360 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5361 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005362 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005363 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005364
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005365- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5366 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5367
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005368- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5369 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5370
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005371- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5372 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5373 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5374 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5375
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005376- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5377 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005378 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005379 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5380 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005381
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005382- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5383
5384
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005385Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005386-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005387
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005388- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005389 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005390 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5391 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5392
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005393- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5394 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5395
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005396- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5397 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5398 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5399 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5400
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005401- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5402 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5403 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5404
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005405- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5406
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005407- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5408
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005409- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5410 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5411 that are still imported into string.py).
5412
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005413- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5414
5415- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5416 Now it does.
5417
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005418- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5419
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005420- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5421 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5422 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5423 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5424 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005425 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5426 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005427
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005428- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5429 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5430 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5431 'help(object)'.
5432
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005433Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005434-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005435
5436- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005437 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005438 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5439 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5440
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005441- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005442 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5443 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005444
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005445C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005446-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005447
5448- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5449 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005450
5451----
5452
5453**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**