blob: 4add264fb9c3563a89435d84d43b7d071b1048ae [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10Core and builtins
11-----------------
12
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +000013- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
14 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
15
Martin v. Löwis13a1fde2005-01-27 18:56:16 +000016- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +000017 an ferror() call.
18
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +000019- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
20 list.sort().
21
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +000022- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
23 (2+3) --> (5).
24
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +000025- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
26
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +000027- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
28 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000029
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +000030- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
31 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
32 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
33
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000034Extension Modules
35-----------------
36
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +000037- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
38
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +000039- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
40 {remove_history,replace_history}
41
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +000042- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
43 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +000044
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +000045- stat_float_times is now True.
46
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +000047- array.array objects are now picklable.
48
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +000049- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
50 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
51
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +000052- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
53 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
54 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
55
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +000056- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
57 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000058
59Library
60-------
61
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +000062- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
63
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +000064- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
65
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +000066- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
67 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
68 be exploited in various ways.
69
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +000070- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
71
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +000072- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
73
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +000074- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
75
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +000076- Enhancements to the csv module:
77
78 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
79 reflecting it's capabilities, and improving it's compliance with
80 PEP 305.
81 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
82 reporting.
83 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
84 dictates.
85 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +000086 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +000087 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +000088 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
89 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +000090 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
91 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +000092 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +000093 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
94 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
95 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
96 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
97 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
98 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
99 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
100 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
101 without first creating a dialect class.
102 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
103 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
104 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000105 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000106 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
107 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000108 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
109 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
110 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
111 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000112 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
113 This has been fixed.
114
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000115- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
116 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
117 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
118 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
119
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000120- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
121
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000122- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
123 (Bug #951915).
124
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000125- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
126 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
127 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
128 encoding alias table
129
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000130- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
131
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000132- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
133 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
134
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000135- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
136
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000137- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
138
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000139- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
140
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000141- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
142
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000143- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
144
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000145- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
146 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
147 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
148
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000149- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000150 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000151
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000152- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
153 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
154 tokenizer with very long source lines.
155
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000156- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
157 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
158
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000159- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
160 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000161
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000162- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
163 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
164
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000165Build
166-----
167
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000168- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
169 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
170
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000171- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
172 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
173 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
174 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
175 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
176 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
177 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
178 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
179
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000180- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
181 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
182 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
183 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
184
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000185
186C API
187-----
188
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000189- Removed PyRange_New().
190
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000191
192Tests
193-----
194
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000195- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000196
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000197
198Documentation
199-------------
200
201- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
202 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
203 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
204
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000205Mac
206---
207
208
209
210Tools/Demos
211-----------
212
213
214
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000215What's New in Python 2.4 final?
216===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000217
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000218*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000219
220Core and builtins
221-----------------
222
223- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
224 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
225 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
226
227
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000228What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
229==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000230
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000231*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000232
233Core and builtins
234-----------------
235
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000236- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
237 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
238 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
239
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000240
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000241Library
242-------
243
244- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
245 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
246 raised is re-raised.
247
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000248- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
249 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
250
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000251- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
252 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
253 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
254 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
255 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
256 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
257 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
258 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
259 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
260 by the slice are recomputed now.
261
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000262- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000263
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000264Build
265-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000266
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000267- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
268 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
269 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000270
271C API
272-----
273
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000274- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
275
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000276
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000277What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
278================================
279
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000280*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000281
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000282License
283-------
284
285The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
286is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
287changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
288Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
289intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
290durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
291the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
292License::
293
294 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
295
296says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
297to Python 2.1.1.
298
299The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
300License Version 2.
301
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000302Core and builtins
303-----------------
304
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000305- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
306 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
307 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
308 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
309 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
310 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
311 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
312 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
313 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
314 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
315
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000316- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000317
318Extension Modules
319-----------------
320
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000321- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
322 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
323 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
324 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000325
326Library
327-------
328
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000329- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
330 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
331 returned.
332
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000333- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
334
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000335- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
336 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
337
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000338- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
339
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000340- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
341 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000342
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000343- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
344
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000345- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
346
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000347- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000348 the source code is updated and reloaded.
349
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000350Build
351-----
352
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000353- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000354
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000355What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
356================================
357
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000358*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000359
360Core and builtins
361-----------------
362
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000363- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000364 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
365
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000366- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
367 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
368 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
369 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
370
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000371- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
372 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
373
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000374- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
375 constant.
376
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000377- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
378 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
379 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
380 large), and to anomalies such as
381 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
382 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
383 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
384 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000385
386Extension modules
387-----------------
388
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000389- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
390 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000391 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
392 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
393 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000394
395Library
396-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000397
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000398- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000399 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000400 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
401 --swig-cpp.
402
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000403- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
404 it is set.
405
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000406- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000407
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000408- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
409 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
410 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
411 Closes bug #1039270.
412
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000413- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000414
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000415 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000416 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
417 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
418 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
419 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
420 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
421 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
422 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
423 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
424 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
425 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
426 + Updates to documentation.
427
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000428- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
429 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
430 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
431 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
432
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000433- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000434
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000435- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
436 applications should use the getmember function.
437
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000438- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
439
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000440- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
441 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
442 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
443 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
444 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
445 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
446 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
447 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
448 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
449
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000450- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
451 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000452 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000453
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000454- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
455 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
456 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
457 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
458 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
459 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
460 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
461 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000462
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000463- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
464 the new public features (of which there are many).
465
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000466- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000467 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
468 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
469 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
470 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000471 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000472
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000473- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
474
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000475- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
476 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
477 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
478 options.
479
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000480- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
481 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
482 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
483 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
484 conditions under which non-string values work.
485
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000486Build
487-----
488
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000489- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
490 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
491 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
492
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000493- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
494 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
495 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
496 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
497 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000498
499C API
500-----
501
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000502- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
503 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
504
505- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
506
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000507- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
508 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
509 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
510 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
511 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
512 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
513 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
514 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
515 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
516
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000517- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
518
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000519- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
520 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
521 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000522
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000523Tests
524-----
525
526- test__locale ported to unittest
527
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000528Mac
529---
530
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000531- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
532 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
533 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000534
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000535Tools/Demos
536-----------
537
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000538- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
539 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
540 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
541 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
542 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000543
544
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000545What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
546=================================
547
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000548*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000549
550Core and builtins
551-----------------
552
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000553- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000554 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
555
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000556- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
557 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
558 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
559 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
560 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
561 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
562 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
563 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000564 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
565 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
566 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
567 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
568 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000569
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000570- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
571 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
572 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
573 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
574 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
575
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000576- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
577
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000578- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
579 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
580
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000581- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
582 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
583 modified the list.
584
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000585- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
586 functions is now writable.
587
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000588- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
589 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
590 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
591 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
592
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000593- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
594 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
595 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
596 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
597 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000598
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000599- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
600 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
601
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000602Extension modules
603-----------------
604
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000605- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
606
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000607- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
608 data.
609
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000610- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
611 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
612 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
613 supposed to have been truncated away.
614
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000615- Added socket.socketpair().
616
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000617- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
618 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
619
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000620- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000621 versions of Python, have now been removed.
622
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000623Library
624-------
625
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000626- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000627 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000628
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000629- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
630 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
631
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000632- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
633 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
634
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000635- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
636
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000637- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
638 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000639
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000640- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
641 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
642
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000643- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
644
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000645- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
646
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000647- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
648
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000649- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
650 Percivall.
651
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000652- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
653 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
654
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000655- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
656 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
657 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000658 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000659
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000660- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
661 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
662 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
663 and exponent.
664
665- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
666
667- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
668 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
669 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
670
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000671- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
672 to the readline module.
673
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000674- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000675 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
676 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000677
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000678- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
679 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
680 contains symlinks.
681
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000682- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
683 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
684
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000685- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
686 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
687 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
688
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000689- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
690 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
691 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
692 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
693 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
694 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
695 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
696 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
697 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
698 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
699 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
700 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
701 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
702
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000703- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
704
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000705Tools/Demos
706-----------
707
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000708- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
709 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
710
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000711- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
712
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000713Build
714-----
715
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000716- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
717 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
718 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
719 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
720 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
721 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
722 plans to do so.
723
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000724- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
725 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
726
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000727- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
728 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
729
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000730- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
731 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
732
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000733- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
734 GNU/k*BSD systems.
735
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000736- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
737 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
738
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000739C API
740-----
741
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000742..
743
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000744Documentation
745-------------
746
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000747- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
748 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
749
750- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
751 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
752 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000753
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000754New platforms
755-------------
756
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000757- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
758
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000759Tests
760-----
761
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000762..
763
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000764Windows
765-------
766
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000767- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
768 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
769 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
770 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
771 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
772 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
773 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
774 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
775 the problem.
776
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000777Mac
778---
779
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000780..
781
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000782
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000783What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
784=================================
785
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000786*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000787
788Core and builtins
789-----------------
790
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000791- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
792 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
793 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
794 sensitive code.
795
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000796- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000797 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000798
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000799 @staticmethod
800 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000801
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000802 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000803
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000804- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
805 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
806 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
807 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
808 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
809 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
810 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
811 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
812 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
813 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
814 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
815
816 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
817 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
818 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
819 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
820 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
821 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
822 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
823
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000824- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
825 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
826
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000827- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000828 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000829
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000830- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000831 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000832 which was missing for no apparent reason.
833
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000834- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000835 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
836 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
837
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000838- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
839 types that support garbage collection.
840
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000841- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
842
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000843- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
844 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
845 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
846 Jython.
847
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000848- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
849
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000850- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
851 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
852
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000853- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
854 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
855 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000856
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000857- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
858 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
859 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
860
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000861Extension modules
862-----------------
863
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000864- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
865
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000866Library
867-------
868
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000869- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
870 TIS-620
871
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000872- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
873 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
874 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
875 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
876 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
877 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
878 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
879 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
880 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
881 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
882
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000883- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
884
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000885- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
886 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
887 same as when the argument is omitted).
888 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
889
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000890- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
891
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000892- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
893 schemes are offered.
894
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000895- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
896
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000897- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
898 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
899 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
900
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000901- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
902
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000903- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
904 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
905
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000906- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
907 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
908 when dummy_threading is being used.
909
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000910- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
911 from a tarfile.
912
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000913- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000914 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000915
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000916- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
917 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
918 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
919 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
920
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000921- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
922 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
923
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000924- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
925 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
926 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
927 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
928 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
929 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
930 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
931 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
932 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
933 by some other method in progress).
934
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000935- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
936 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
937 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000938
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000939- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
940
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000941- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
942 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
943 AM Kuchling.
944
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000945- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
946 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
947 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
948
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000949- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
950 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
951 instead of unsigned.
952
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000953- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000954 no longer part of the public API.
955
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000956- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
957 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
958 string methods of the same name).
959
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000960- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000961 SF patch 945642.
962
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000963- doctest unittest integration improvements:
964
965 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
966
967 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
968 DocTestSuites.
969
970- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
971 that provide thread-local data.
972
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000973- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
974 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
975
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000976- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
977
978- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
979 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
980 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
981
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000982- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
983
984 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
985 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
986 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000987
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000988 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
989 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
990 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
991 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
992
993 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
994 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
995
996 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
997 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
998 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
999 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1000
1001 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1002 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1003 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1004 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1005 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1006
1007 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1008 wrapping help output.
1009
1010 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1011 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1012 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001013
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001014C API
1015-----
1016
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001017- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1018 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1019 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1020 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1021 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1022 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1023 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1024 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1025 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1026 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1027 its visible semantics have not changed.
1028
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001029- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1030 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1031
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001032Documentation
1033-------------
1034
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001035- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001036
1037 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001038 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001039
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001040 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001041
1042 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1043
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001044- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001045
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001046Tests
1047-----
1048
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001049- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001050 platforms that use the Makefile.
1051
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001052- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1053 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1054 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1055
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001056
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001057What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1058=================================
1059
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001060*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001061
1062Core and builtins
1063-----------------
1064
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001065- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1066 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1067 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1068 objects now (one object instead of three).
1069
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001070- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1071 Windows DLLs.
1072
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001073- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1074 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001075
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001076- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1077 a new .pyc magic.
1078
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001079- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1080 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1081 be there.
1082
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001083- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1084 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1085 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1086
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001087- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1088 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1089 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1090
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001091- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1092
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001093- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1094 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1095 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001096
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001097- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1098 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1099
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001100- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1101
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001102- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001103 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001104
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001105- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1106
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001107- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1108
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001109- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1110 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1111
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001112- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1113 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1114 Fixes bug #858016 .
1115
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001116- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1117 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1118 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1119
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001120- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1121 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1122 improves their performance (about 35%).
1123
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001124- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1125 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1126 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1127
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001128- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1129 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1130 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1131 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1132
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001133- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1134 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
1135 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
1136 length is not known).
1137
1138- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1139 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001140 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1141 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001142 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1143
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001144- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1145 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1146
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001147- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1148 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1149 keyword arguments.
1150
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001151- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1152 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1153 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1154
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001155- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1156 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1157 cases.
1158
1159- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1160 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1161 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1162 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1163 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1164 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1165 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1166 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1167 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1168 a release build.
1169
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001170- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1171 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1172
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001173- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001174 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001175
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001176- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1177 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1178 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1179 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1180 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1181 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1182 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1183 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1184 destroyed.
1185
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001186- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1187 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1188 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1189 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1190 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1191 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1192 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1193 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1194
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001195- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1196 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1197 character other than a space.
1198
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001199- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1200 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1201 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1202 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1203 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1204 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1205 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1206 attributes with the same name.
1207
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001208- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1209 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1210 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1211 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1212 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1213 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1214 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1215 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1216 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1217 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1218 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1219 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1220 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1221 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001222
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001223- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1224 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1225 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1226 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1227 This has been repaired.
1228
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001229- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1230
1231- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1232
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001233- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1234 over a sequence.
1235
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001236- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001237 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001238
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001239- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1240
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001241- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1242 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1243 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1244 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1245 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1246 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1247 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1248 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1249
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001250- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1251 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1252 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1253
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001254- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1255 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1256 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1257 freelist.
1258
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001259- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1260 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1261
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001262- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1263 number.
1264
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001265- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1266 a TypeError exception.
1267
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001268- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1269 820195.
1270
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001271- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1272 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1273 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1274
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001275- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001276 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1277 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001278
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001279- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1280 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1281 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1282
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001283- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1284 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001285 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001286
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001287- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001288 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1289 the first call.
1290
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001291
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001292Extension modules
1293-----------------
1294
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001295- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1296 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1297
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001298- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1299 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1300 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1301 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1302 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1303 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1304 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001305
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001306- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1307
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001308- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1309
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001310- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1311 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1312
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001313- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1314 fewer false positives.
1315
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001316- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1317 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1318
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001319- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001320 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1321
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001322- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001323 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001324 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001325 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1326 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001327
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001328- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1329 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1330 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1331 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1332
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001333- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1334 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1335 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1336 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1337 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1338 #897625.
1339
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001340- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1341 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1342
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001343- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1344 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1345 and pops on either side of the deque.
1346
1347- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1348 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1349
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001350- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1351 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1352 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1353 other functions that expect a function argument.
1354
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001355- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1356
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001357- os.getsid was added.
1358
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001359- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1360 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1361 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1362
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001363- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1364
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001365- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1366
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001367- readline.clear_history was added.
1368
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001369- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1370
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001371- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1372
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001373- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1374
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001375- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1376
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001377- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1378
1379- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1380
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001381- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1382
1383- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1384
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001385- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1386 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1387 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1388
1389- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1390 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1391 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1392 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1393 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1394 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1395 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1396
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001397- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1398 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1399 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1400 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001401
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001402- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001403 iterators from a single iterable.
1404
1405- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1406 of raising a TypeError exception.
1407
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001408- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1409 as parameter.
1410
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001411Library
1412-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001413
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001414- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1415 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1416 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001417
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001418- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1419 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1420 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001421
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001422- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001423
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001424- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1425 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001426
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001427- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1428 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1429
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001430- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1431
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001432- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001433 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001434
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001435- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001436 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001437
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001438- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1439
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001440- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1441 on cygwin and mingw32.
1442
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001443- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1444
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001445- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1446 module.
1447
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001448- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1449 installation scheme for all platforms.
1450
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001451- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001452 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001453
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001454- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1455 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1456 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1457
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001458- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1459 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1460 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1461
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001462- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1463
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001464- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1465
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001466- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1467 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1468
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001469- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1470 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1471 type pattern with the same value exists.
1472
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001473- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1474 when run from the command prompt).
1475
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001476- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1477 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1478
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001479- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1480 default sort).
1481
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001482- Added global runctx function to profile module
1483
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001484- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1485
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001486- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1487
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001488- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1489
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001490- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001491 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1492 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1493 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1494 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1495 accordingly.
1496
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001497- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1498 decoding standards.
1499
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001500- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1501 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1502 called for all requests.
1503
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001504- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1505 they are passed to the compiler.
1506
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001507- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1508 indent, width and depth.
1509
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001510- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1511 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1512
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001513- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1514 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1515
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001516- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1517
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001518- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1519
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001520- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1521
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001522- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1523 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1524
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001525- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001526 for better performance.
1527
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001528- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001529
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001530- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1531 a string).
1532
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001533- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1534
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001535- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1536
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001537- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1538
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001539- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1540
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001541- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1542 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1543 list of fieldnames.
1544
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001545- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1546 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1547
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001548- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1549
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001550- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1551 empty lists.
1552
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001553- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1554 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1555 and shelves.
1556
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001557- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1558 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1559
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001560- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001561 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1562 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001563
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001564- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1565 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001566 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001567
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001568- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001569 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1570 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1571
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001572- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1573 and removed in Py2.4.
1574
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001575- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1576
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001577- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1578
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001579Tools/Demos
1580-----------
1581
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001582- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1583 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1584
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001585- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1586
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001587- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1588 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1589 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1590 destination in situations where both files are given.
1591
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001592- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1593 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1594 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1595 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1596
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001597- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1598
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001599- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1600 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1601 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1602 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1603 now.
1604
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001605- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1606 in effect
1607
1608- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1609 C-c C-h
1610
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001611- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1612 -d option was given.
1613
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001614Build
1615-----
1616
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001617- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1618 build under OS X.
1619
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001620- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1621 --enable-profiling.
1622
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001623- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1624 is configured --with-tsc.
1625
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001626- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1627 on AMD64.
1628
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001629- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1630 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1631
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001632- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1633 removed.
1634
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001635- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1636 supported (see PEP 11).
1637
1638- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1639
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001640- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1641
1642- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1643 (see PEP 11).
1644
1645- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1646 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1647
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001648C API
1649-----
1650
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001651- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1652 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1653 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1654
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001655- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1656 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1657 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1658 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1659
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001660- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1661 generator objects.
1662
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001663- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1664 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001665 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1666 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001667
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001668- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1669 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1670
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001671- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1672 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1673 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1674 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1675 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1676
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001677- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1678 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1679 about 10% faster.
1680
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001681- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1682 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1683
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001684- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1685 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1686 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1687 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1688
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001689Windows
1690-------
1691
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001692- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1693 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1694 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1695 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1696
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001697- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1698 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1699 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1700
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001701
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001702What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1703===============================
1704
1705*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1706
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001707IDLE
1708----
1709
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001710- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1711 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1712 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1713 context-menu actions.
1714
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001715- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1716 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1717 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1718 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1719 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1720 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1721 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1722 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1723 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1724
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001725
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001726What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1727=============================================
1728
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001729*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001730
1731Core and builtins
1732-----------------
1733
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001734- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001735 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001736 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1737
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001738Extension modules
1739-----------------
1740
1741- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1742 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1743 than once. This has been fixed.
1744
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001745- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1746 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1747 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1748 call.
1749
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001750- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1751
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001752Library
1753-------
1754
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001755- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1756 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1757
1758- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1759 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1760 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1761 restored.
1762
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001763IDLE
1764----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001765
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001766- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001767
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001768Build
1769-----
1770
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001771- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1772 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1773
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001774C API
1775-----
1776
1777Windows
1778-------
1779
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001780- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1781 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1782
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001783- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1784
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001785Mac
1786---
1787
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001788- Various fixes to pimp.
1789
1790- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1791
1792- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1793 more problems than it solves.
1794
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001795
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001796What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1797=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001798
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001799*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1800
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001801Core and builtins
1802-----------------
1803
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001804- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1805 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1806
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001807- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1808 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001809 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001810
1811- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1812 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1813 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001814 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001815
1816- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1817 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001818
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001819- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1820 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1821 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1822
1823- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001824 770247.
1825
1826- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001827
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001828Extension modules
1829-----------------
1830
1831- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1832 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1833
1834- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1835
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001836- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1837
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001838- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1839 contained within the _strptime module.
1840
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001841- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1842 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1843
1844- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001845 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1846
1847- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1848 the find_class attribute, if present.
1849
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001850- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001851
1852 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1853 (SF bug 763298).
1854
1855 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001856 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1857 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1858 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001859
1860 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1861
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001862Library
1863-------
1864
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001865- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1866
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001867- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1868 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1869 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1870 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1871 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1872 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1873 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1874 or Tester().
1875
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001876- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1877 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1878 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1879 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1880 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1881 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1882 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1883 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1884 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001885
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001886 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001887
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001888- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1889 weren't before was an oversight.
1890
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001891- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1892 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1893
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001894- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1895 when there are no lines.
1896
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001897- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1898 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1899
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001900- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1901 to child processes.
1902
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001903- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1904
1905- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1906
1907- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1908 xmlrpclib.
1909
1910- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1911 responses.
1912
1913- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1914 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1915
1916- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1917 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1918 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1919
1920- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1921 used as patterns.
1922
1923- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1924 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1925 than Tk 8.3.
1926
1927- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1928
1929- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001930
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001931Tools/Demos
1932-----------
1933
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001934- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1935
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001936- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1937
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001938- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001939
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001940Build
1941-----
1942
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001943- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1944
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001945- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1946
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001947- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1948 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001949
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001950- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1951 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1952 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001953
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001954C API
1955-----
1956
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001957- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1958 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1959
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001960Windows
1961-------
1962
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001963- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1964 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1965 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1966 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1967 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1968 Python exception ::
1969
1970 thread.error: can't start new thread
1971
1972 is raised now.
1973
1974- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1975 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1976 instead of from DLL teardown.
1977
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001978Mac
1979---
1980
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001981- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001982 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001983 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1984 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1985 the executable in the bundle.
1986
1987- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001988
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001989- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1990
1991- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1992 on Panther.
1993
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001994What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1995================================
1996
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001997*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001998
1999Core and builtins
2000-----------------
2001
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002002- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2003 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2004 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2005 with the -i option.
2006
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002007- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2008 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2009
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002010- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2011 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2012
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002013- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2014 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2015 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2016 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2017 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2018 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2019 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2020 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2021 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2022 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2023 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2024 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2025 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002026
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002027- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2028 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2029 embedded in a lambda expression.
2030
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002031- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2032 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2033 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2034 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2035 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2036
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002037- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2038 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2039 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2040
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002041- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2042 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2043
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002044- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2045 It's writable again.
2046
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002047- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2048 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2049 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002050 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002051
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002052- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2053 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2054 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2055
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002056Extension modules
2057-----------------
2058
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002059- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2060 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2061
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002062- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2063 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2064 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2065 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2066
2067- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2068 collection.
2069
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002070- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2071 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2072 unique within a single program run.
2073
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002074- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2075 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2076
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002077- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2078 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2079
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002080- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2081 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002082
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002083- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2084
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002085- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2086 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2087
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002088- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2089 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2090 for many BSD-derived systems.
2091
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002092
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002093Library
2094-------
2095
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002096- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2097 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2098 primary ones:
2099
2100 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2101 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2102 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2103
2104 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2105 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2106 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2107 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2108 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2109 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2110
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002111- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2112 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2113 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2114 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2115 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2116 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2117 argument.
2118
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002119- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2120 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2121 in the archive.
2122
2123- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2124 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2125
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002126- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2127 569574).
2128
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002129- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2130 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2131 no more.
2132
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002133- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2134 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2135 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2136 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2137 code coverage.
2138
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002139- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2140 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2141 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002142 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2143 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002144
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002145- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2146 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2147 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002148 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002149
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002150- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2151
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002152- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2153 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2154 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2155 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2156
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002157- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2158 handling.
2159
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002160- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2161 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2162
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002163- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2164 in socket.py.
2165
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002166- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2167
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002168- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2169 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2170 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2171 opener with proxy support.
2172
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002173- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2174
2175- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2176
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002177Tools/Demos
2178-----------
2179
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002180- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2181
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002182- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2183
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002184- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2185 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002186
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002187- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2188 files.
2189
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002190Build
2191-----
2192
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002193- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002194 different root directory.
2195
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002196C API
2197-----
2198
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002199- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2200 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2201 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2202 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2203 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2204 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2205 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2206 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2207 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2208 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2209
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002210- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2211 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2212 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2213 from Python.
2214
2215
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002216New platforms
2217-------------
2218
2219None this time.
2220
2221Tests
2222-----
2223
2224- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2225 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2226
2227Windows
2228-------
2229
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002230- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2231
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002232- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2233 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2234 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2235 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2236 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2237 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2238 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2239 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2240 that's what it's for.
2241
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002242Mac
2243---
2244
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002245- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2246 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2247 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2248 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002249- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2250 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2251- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002252
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002253SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2254------------------------------------
2255
2256430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2257598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2258622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2259661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2260683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2261697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2262713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2263724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2264727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2265729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2266730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2267731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2268732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2269733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2270735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2271740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2272744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2273745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2274747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2275749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2276751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2277753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2278755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2279757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2280760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2281
2282
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002283What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2284================================
2285
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002286*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002287
2288Core and builtins
2289-----------------
2290
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002291- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2292 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2293
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002294- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2295 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2296 and cannot be strings).
2297
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002298- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2299 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2300 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2301 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2302
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002303- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2304 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2305 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2306 Python itself.
2307
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002308- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2309 the referenced object, if it has one.
2310
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002311- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2312 the thread started at
2313 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2314
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002315- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2316 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2317 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2318 placed on a list index.
2319
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002320- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2321 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2322 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2323 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2324
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002325- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2326 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2327 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2328 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2329 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2330 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2331 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2332
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002333- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2334 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2335 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2336 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2337 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2338
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002339- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2340 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002341
2342- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2343 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2344 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2345 #693195.)
2346
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002347- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2348 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002349
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002350- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002351 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002352 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2353 interpreter executions, would fail.
2354
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002355- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002356 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002357 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002358
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002359Extension modules
2360-----------------
2361
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002362- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2363 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2364 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2365 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2366
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002367- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2368 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2369
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002370- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2371 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2372 and Greg Chapman.)
2373
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002374- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2375 recursively.
2376
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002377- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002378 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2379 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2380 leaks.
2381
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002382- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2383
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002384- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2385 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2386 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2387 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2388 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2389 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2390 #705836.
2391
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002392- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002393 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2394
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002395- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2396 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2397 See SF bug #692416.
2398
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002399- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2400 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2401
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002402- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2403 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2404 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002405
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002406- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002407 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2408 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2409
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002410- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2411 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2412 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2413 timeouts to work properly.
2414
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002415Library
2416-------
2417
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002418- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2419 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2420 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2421 future release.
2422
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002423- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2424 for querying platform dependent features.
2425
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002426- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002427
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002428- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2429 pickle protocol versions.
2430
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002431- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2432 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2433 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2434
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002435- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2436
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002437- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2438 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2439 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2440 modules.
2441
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002442- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2443 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2444 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2445
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002446- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2447 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2448
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002449- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2450 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2451 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2452
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002453- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002454 MS Office extensions.
2455
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002456- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2457 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2458
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002459- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2460 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2461
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002462- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2463 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2464 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2465 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2466 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2467 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2468
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002469- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2470 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2471 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002472
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002473- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2474 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2475 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2476
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002477- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2478
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002479- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2480 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2481 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2482
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002483Tools/Demos
2484-----------
2485
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002486- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2487 See the module docstring for details.
2488
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002489Build
2490-----
2491
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002492- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2493 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002494
2495C API
2496-----
2497
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002498- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2499
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002500- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2501 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2502 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2503
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002504- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2505 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002506
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002507 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2508 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2509 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002510
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002511- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002512 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2513
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002514- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2515 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2516 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002517
2518New platforms
2519-------------
2520
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002521None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002522
2523Tests
2524-----
2525
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002526- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2527 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002528
2529Windows
2530-------
2531
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002532- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2533 function.
2534
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002535- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2536 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002537
2538Mac
2539---
2540
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002541- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2542 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002543
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002544- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2545 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002546
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002547- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2548 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2549 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002550
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002551- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002552 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2553 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002554
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002555- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2556 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002557
2558
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002559What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2560=================================
2561
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002562*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002563
2564Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002565-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002566
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002567- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2568 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2569 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2570
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002571- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2572 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2573 (SF patch #664376.)
2574
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002575- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2576 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2577 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2578 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2579 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2580 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002581 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002582
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002583- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2584 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2585 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2586 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002587 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002588
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002589- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2590 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2591 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2592 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2593 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2594 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2595 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2596 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2597 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2598 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2599 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2600
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002601- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2602 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2603 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2604 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2605 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2606 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2607
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002608- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2609 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2610
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002611- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2612 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2613 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2614 case.)
2615
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002616- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2617 passed as unicode strings.
2618
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002619- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2620 See SF bug #683467.
2621
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002622- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2623 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2624
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002625- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2626
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002627- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2628
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002629- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2630 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2631 arguments.
2632
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002633- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2634 See SF bug #667147.
2635
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002636- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002637 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002638 See SF bug #676155.
2639
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002640- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002641 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002642 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2643 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2644 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2645 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2646 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2647 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002648
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002649Extension modules
2650-----------------
2651
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002652- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2653 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2654 tp_as_number pointer.
2655
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002656- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2657 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2658 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2659 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2660 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2661
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002662- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2663
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002664- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2665
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002666- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002667 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002668 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2669 patch #678531.)
2670
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002671- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2672 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2673
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002674- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2675 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2676
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002677- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2678
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002679- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2680 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2681 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2682
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002683- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2684
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002685- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2686 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2687
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002688- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002689
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002690- datetime changes:
2691
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002692 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2693
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002694 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2695 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2696 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2697 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2698 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2699 now.
2700
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002701 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002702 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2703 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002704
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002705 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002706 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002707 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2708 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2709 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2710 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002711
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002712 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2713 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2714 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002715 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2716
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002717 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2718 by a later example coded by Guido.
2719
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002720 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002721 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2722 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2723 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002724 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2725 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2726
2727 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2728 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2729 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2730 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2731 tzinfo subclass instance.
2732
2733 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2734 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2735 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2736 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2737 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2738 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2739 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2740 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002741
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002742 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2743 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2744 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2745 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2746 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002747 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2748
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002749 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002750
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002751 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2752 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2753 as a naive datetime object.
2754
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002755 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2756 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2757 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2758
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002759 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2760 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2761 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2762 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2763 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2764 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2765 comparison.
2766
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002767 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2768 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2769 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2770 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002771 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002772
2773 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002774
2775 and ::
2776
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002777 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2778
2779 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2780 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2781 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2782 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2783
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002784 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2785 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2786 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2787 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2788 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2789
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002790 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2791 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002792 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2793 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002794
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002795Library
2796-------
2797
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002798- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2799 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2800
2801- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2802 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2803 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2804 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2805 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2806 See PEP 307 for details.
2807
2808- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2809 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2810
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002811- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2812 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002813 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002814 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2815 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002816 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002817
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002818- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2819 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2820
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002821- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2822 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2823 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2824
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002825- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2826
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002827- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2828 exception.
2829
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002830- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2831 class.
2832
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002833- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2834 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2835 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2836
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002837- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2838 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2839
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002840- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002841 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2842 See SF bug #659228.
2843
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002844- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2845 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2846 See SF patch #651082.
2847
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002848- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002849
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002850- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2851 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2852
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002853- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002854 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002855
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002856- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2857 DOS paths from other platforms.
2858
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002859Tools/Demos
2860-----------
2861
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002862- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2863 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2864 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2865 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2866 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2867 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2868 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2869 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2870 example:
2871
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002872 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2873 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002874
2875 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2876
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002877
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002878Build
2879-----
2880
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002881- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2882 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2883 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002884 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2885
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002886 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2887
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002888- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2889 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2890 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2891 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2892 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2893 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2894 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2895 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2896 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2897
2898- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2899 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2900 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2901 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2902
2903- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2904 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2905
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002906C API
2907-----
2908
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002909- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2910 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002911
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002912- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2913 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2914 tp_as_number pointer.
2915
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002916- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2917 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2918 (SF #681367)
2919
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002920- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2921 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2922 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2923 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002924
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002925Tests
2926-----
2927
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002928- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002929 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2930 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2931 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2932 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2933 pydoc.)
2934
2935- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2936
2937- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002938
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002939Windows
2940-------
2941
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002942- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2943 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2944 time).
2945
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002946- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2947 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2948
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002949- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2950 release without strong cryptography.
2951
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002952- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002953 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002954
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002955- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2956 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2957
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002958Mac
2959---
2960
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002961- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2962 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002963
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002964- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2965 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2966 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002967
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002968- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2969 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002970
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002971- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2972 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2973 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2974 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002975
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002976- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002977 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2978 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2979 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002980
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002981
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002982What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002983=================================
2984
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002985*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002986
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002987Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002988--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002989
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002990- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2991
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002992- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2993 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002994 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002995 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002996 a different meaning than before.
2997
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002998- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002999 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003000 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003001
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003002- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003003 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003004 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003005
3006- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3007 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3008 and deallocation.
3009
3010- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3011 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3012
3013- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3014 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3015 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3016 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3017 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3018
3019- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3020 now detected by the garbage collector.
3021
3022- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3023 [SF bug 519621]
3024
3025- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3026 identifier.
3027
3028- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3029 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3030 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3031 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3032 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3033 [SF bug 563060]
3034
3035- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3036 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3037 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3038 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3039 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3040
3041- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3042 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3043 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3044
3045- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3046
3047- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3048 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3049 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3050 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3051 state of the slots would be lost.)
3052
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003053Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003054-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003055
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003056- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003057 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3058 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3059 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3060 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003061 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3062 Jython 2.1.
3063
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003064- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003065 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003066 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3067 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3068 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3069 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3070 these, see PEP 302.
3071
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003072- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3073 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3074 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3075
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003076- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3077 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3078 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3079
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003080- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3081 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3082 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3083
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003084- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3085 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3086 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3087 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3088 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3089 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3090 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3091 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3092 releases or implementations.
3093
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003094- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003095 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3096 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003097
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003098- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3099 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3100
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003101- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3102 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3103 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3104
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003105- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3106 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3107
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003108- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3109 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003110 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3111 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003112
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003113- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3114 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3115 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3116 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3117 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3118
3119 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3120 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3121 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3122 pattern.
3123
3124 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3125 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3126 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3127 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3128
3129 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3130 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3131 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3132 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3133 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3134 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3135
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003136- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3137 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3138 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3139 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3140 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3141 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3142 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3143 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003144
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003145- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3146 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3147 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3148 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3149 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003150 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3151 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3152 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3153 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3154 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3155 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3156 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003157
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003158- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3159 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3160
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003161- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3162 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3163 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3164 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3165 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3166 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3167 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3168 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3169 to Zack Weinberg!
3170
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003171- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3172 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3173 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3174 type. This has been fixed now.
3175
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003176- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3177 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3178 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3179
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003180- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3181 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3182 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3183 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3184 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3185 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3186 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3187 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003188 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003189
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003190- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3191 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3192 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003193
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003194- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3195 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3196 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3197 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3198 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3199 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3200 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3201 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003202 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003203 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3204 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3205
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003206- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3207 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3208 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3209 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3210 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3211 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3212 this.)
3213
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003214- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3215 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003216 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003217 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003218 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3219 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003220 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3221 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003222
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003223- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3224 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3225 currently running.
3226
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003227- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3228 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3229 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3230 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3231
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003232- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3233 as directory names.
3234
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003235- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3236 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3237
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003238- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3239 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3240
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003241- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003242 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3243 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003244
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003245- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3246 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3247 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3248 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3249 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3250
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003251- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3252 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3253 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3254 removed.
3255
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003256- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3257 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3258 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3259
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003260- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3261 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3262 to __debug__.
3263
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003264- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3265 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3266 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3267
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003268- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3269 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3270 deprecated now.
3271
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003272- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3273 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3274 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003275
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003276- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3277 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3278 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3279 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3280 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003281
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003282- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3283 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3284
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003285- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3286 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3287 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003288 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003289 is backward compatible.
3290
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003291- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3292 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3293 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3294 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3295 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3296
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003297- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3298 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3299 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3300 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3301 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3302 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003303
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003304- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3305 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3306
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003307- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3308 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3309
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003310- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3311 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3312 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3313 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3314 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3315
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003316- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3317 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3318 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3319
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003320- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003321 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3322
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003323- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3324 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3325 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003326
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003327- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3328 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3329
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003330- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3331 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3332 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3333
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003334- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3335
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003336Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003337-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003338
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003339- Added three operators to the operator module:
3340 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3341 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3342 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3343
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003344- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3345
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003346- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3347 archives.
3348
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003349- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3350 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3351 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3352
3353 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3354
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003355- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3356 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3357 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003358 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003359
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003360- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3361 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3362 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3363 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003364 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3365 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3366 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3367 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003368
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003369- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3370 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003371
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003372- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3373
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003374- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3375 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3376
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003377- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3378 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3379 supported.
3380
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003381- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3382
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003383- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3384 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003385
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003386- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3387 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3388
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003389- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3390
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003391- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3392 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3393
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003394- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3395 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3396 functions but callable type objects.
3397
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003398- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003399 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003400 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003401
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003402- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3403 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003404
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003405- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3406 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003407
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003408- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3409 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3410 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3411 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3412
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003413- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3414 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003415
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003416- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3417 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3418 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3419 and __imul__.
3420
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003421- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003422 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3423 is called.
3424
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003425- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3426 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3427 interpreter was compiled.
3428
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003429- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3430 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3431 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003432 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003433 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3434 1, not 2.
3435
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003436- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3437 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3438 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3439 limit.
3440
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003441- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3442 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3443 bug #623464.
3444
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003445- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3446 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3447 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3448 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3449
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003450Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003451-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003452
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003453- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3454
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003455- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3456 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3457 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3458 with Python 2.3a2.
3459
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003460- os.path exposes getctime.
3461
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003462- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003463 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003464 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003465 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003466 unit tests of floating point results.
3467
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003468- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3469 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3470 has been increased.
3471
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003472- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3473 executed.
3474
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003475- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3476 postinstallation script.
3477
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003478- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3479 test the current module.
3480
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003481- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003482 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3483 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3484 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3485 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3486
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003487- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003488 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003489 Ward's Optik package.
3490
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003491- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3492 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3493 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3494 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3495
3496- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3497 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003498 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003499
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003500- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3501 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3502 shelf are binary pickles.
3503
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003504- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3505 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3506
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003507- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3508 modules are iterators now.
3509
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003510- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3511 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3512 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3513 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3514 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3515 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003516
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003517- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3518 with their entity value.
3519
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003520- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3521
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003522- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3523 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003524
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003525- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3526 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003527 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003528
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003529- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3530 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3531 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3532 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3533 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3534 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3535 main():
3536
3537 import locale
3538 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3539
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003540- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3541 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3542
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003543- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3544 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3545 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3546 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3547 to the new standard.
3548
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003549- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3550 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3551 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3552 an extension to the database.
3553
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003554- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3555 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3556 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3557 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003558 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003559
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003560- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003561 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003562
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003563- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3564 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3565 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3566 bounded integers.
3567
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003568- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3569 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3570 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3571 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3572 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3573 in existence.
3574
3575 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3576 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3577 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3578 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3579 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3580 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3581
3582 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3583 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3584 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3585 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3586
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003587- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3588 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3589 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3590
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003591- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3592
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003593- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3594 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3595 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3596 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3597
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003598- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3599 argument.
3600
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003601- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3602 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3603 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3604 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3605 [SF patch 560794].
3606
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003607- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3608 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3609 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003610 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3611 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3612 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003613
3614- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3615 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003616
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003617- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3618 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3619 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3620 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003621
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003622- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3623 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3624 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3625 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3626 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3627
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003628- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003629
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003630- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3631
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003632- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3633 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3634 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3635 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3636 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3637 identical to None.
3638
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003639- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3640 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3641 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3642 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3643 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3644 results now.
3645
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003646- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3647 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3648
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003649- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3650 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3651 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3652 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3653 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3654 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3655 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3656 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3657
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003658- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3659
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003660- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3661 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3662
3663- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3664 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3665 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3666 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3667 and other systems.
3668
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003669- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3670 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3671 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3672 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 +00003673 work well with these.
3674
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003675- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3676
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003677- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003678 connections.
3679
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003680- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3681 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3682 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3683
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003684- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3685 sets
3686
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003687- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3688 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3689 name.
3690
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003691- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3692 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3693 passed in.
3694
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003695- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003696 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003697 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3698 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003699
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003700- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3701
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003702- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3703
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003704- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3705 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3706 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3707
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003708- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3709 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3710 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3711 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003712 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003713
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003714- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003715 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003716 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003717
3718- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3719 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3720 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3721
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003722- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003723 the value of its expression argument.
3724
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003725- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3726 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3727 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3728
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003729- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3730 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3731 skipstone browser was included.
3732
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003733- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3734 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3735
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003736Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003737-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003738
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003739- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3740 names in addition to accepting file names.
3741
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003742- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3743 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3744 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3745 still used and useful.)
3746
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003747- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3748 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3749 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3750 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003751
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003752- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3753 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3754 the generated binary.
3755
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003756Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003757-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003758
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003759- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3760
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003761- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3762 except in the hands of experts.
3763
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003764- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003765 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3766 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3767 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003768
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003769- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3770 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3771 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3772 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3773 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3774 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3775 builds.
3776
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003777- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3778 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3779 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3780 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3781 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3782 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3783 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3784 new type.
3785
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003786- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003787
3788 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3789 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3790 positive infinities.
3791
3792 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3793 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3794 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3795 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3796 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3797 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3798 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3799
3800 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3801
3802 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3803
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003804- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3805 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3806 size of the executable.
3807
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003808- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3809 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3810 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3811 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003812
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003813- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3814
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003815- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3816 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3817 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003818
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003819- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3820 well as Unix.
3821
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003822- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3823 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3824 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3825 modules in the README file for details.
3826
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003827C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003828-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003829
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003830- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3831 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003832 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003833 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003834 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003835
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003836- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3837 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3838 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3839 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3840 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3841 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003842 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003843 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3844 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3845 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3846 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3847 aligned.)
3848
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003849- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3850 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3851 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3852
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003853- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3854 level.
3855
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003856- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3857 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3858 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3859 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3860 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3861
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003862- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3863 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3864 code.
3865
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003866- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3867 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3868 adjusting for negative indices.
3869
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003870- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3871 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3872 object.
3873
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003874- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3875 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3876 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3877
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003878- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3879 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003880
3881- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3882
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003883- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3884 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3885 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3886 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3887
3888- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3889
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003890- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003891
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003892- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003893 without going through the buffer API.
3894
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003895- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003896
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003897- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3898 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3899 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3900 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3901
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003902- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3903 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3904
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003905- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003906 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3907
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003908New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003909-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003910
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003911- OpenVMS is now supported.
3912
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003913- AtheOS is now supported.
3914
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003915- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3916
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003917- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3918
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003919Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003920-----
3921
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003922- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3923 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3924 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003925
3926Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003927-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003928
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003929- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3930 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3931 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3932 bugs.
3933 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003934 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003935 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3936 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003937 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003938
3939- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003940 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003941
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003942- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3943 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3944
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003945- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3946 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003947 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003948 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3949
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003950- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3951 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3952 use files" uninstall option).
3953
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003954- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3955
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003956- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3957 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3958
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003959- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3960 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3961 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3962
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003963- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3964 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3965 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3966 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3967 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003968 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3969 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3970 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003971
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003972- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003973 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003974 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3975 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3976 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3977 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3978 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3979 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3980 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3981 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3982 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3983 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3984 work around.
3985
3986- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3987 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3988 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3989 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3990 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3991 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3992 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3993 specified with O_CREAT too).
3994
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003995Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003996----
3997
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003998- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003999
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004000- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4001 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4002 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4003
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004004- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4005 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4006 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4007
4008- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4009 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4010 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4011 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4012 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4013 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4014 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4015 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004016
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004017- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4018 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4019 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004020
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004021- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4022 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4023 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4024 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4025 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004026
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004027- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4028 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4029 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004030
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004031- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4032 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004033
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004034- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4035 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4036 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4037 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4038 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004039
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004040- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4041 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4042 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4043
4044- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4045 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4046 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004047
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004048- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4049 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4050 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4051 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004052 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004053
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004054- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4055 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004056
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004057- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4058 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004059
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004060- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004061 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004062 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4063 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004064
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004065
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004066What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004067===============================
4068
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004069*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4070
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004071Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004072--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004073
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004074- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4075 with a custom metaclass.
4076
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004077Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004078-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004079
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004080- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4081 are proxies.
4082
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004083Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004084-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004085
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004086- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4087 very short strings.
4088
4089- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4090 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4091 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4092 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4093 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4094
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004095Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004096-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004097
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004098- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4099 close or delete time).
4100
4101- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4102 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4103
4104- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4105
4106- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004107 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004108
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004109Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004110-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004111
4112Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004113-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004114
4115C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004116-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004117
4118New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004119-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004120
4121Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004122-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004123
4124Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004125-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004126
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004127- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4128
4129- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4130 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4131
4132- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4133 deleted at process exit time.
4134
4135- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4136 in backslash.
4137
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004138Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004139----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004140
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004141- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4142 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4143 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4144
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004145
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004146What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004147===========================
4148
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004149*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4150
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004151Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004152--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004153
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004154- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4155 been extensively updated. See
4156
4157 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4158
4159 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4160
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004161- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4162 deleted!
4163
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004164- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4165 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4166 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4167 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4168 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4169
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004170- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4171
4172 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4173 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4174
4175 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4176 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4177 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4178 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4179 supported anyway.
4180
4181 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4182 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4183
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004184- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4185 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4186 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4187 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4188 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004189
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004190- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4191 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4192 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4193
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004194Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004195-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004196
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004197- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4198 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4199 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4200 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4201 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4202 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004203 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4204 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4205 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4206 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004207
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004208- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4209 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4210 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4211
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004212Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004213-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004214
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004215- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4216
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004217Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004218-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004219
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004220- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4221 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4222 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4223 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4224 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4225 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4226
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004227- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4228
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004229- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4230
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004231- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4232
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004233- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4234 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4235 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4236
4237- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4238
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004239Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004240-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004241
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004242- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4243 off a search on Google.
4244
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004245Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004246-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004247
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004248- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4249 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4250 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4251 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4252 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4253 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4254 other platforms should do likewise.
4255
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004256- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4257 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4258 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4259
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004260C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004261-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004262
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004263- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4264 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4265 producing key-value pairs.
4266
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004267- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004268 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004269 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4270 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4271 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4272 previously went unchallenged.
4273
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004274New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004275-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004276
4277Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004278-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004279
4280Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004281-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004282
4283Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004284----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004285
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004286- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4287 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004288
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004289- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4290 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4291 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4292 home.
4293
4294
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004295What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004296===========================
4297
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004298*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4299
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004300Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004301--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004302
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004303- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4304 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004305
4306 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004307 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004308
4309 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4310 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004311 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004312 This needs to be documented.
4313
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004314- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4315 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4316
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004317- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4318 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4319 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4320
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004321- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4322 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4323
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004324- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4325 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4326 class forbids it).
4327
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004328- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4329 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4330 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4331
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004332- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4333
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004334Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004335-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004336
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004337- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4338 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004339 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004340
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004341- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4342 (like 1 + '').
4343
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004344Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004345-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004346
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004347- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4348 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4349 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4350 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004351 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004352 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4353
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004354- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4355 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4356 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4357 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4358
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004359- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4360 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004361 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4362 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4363 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004364
4365- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4366 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004367
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004368- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4369 bytes on its input.
4370
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004371Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004372-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004373
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004374- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004375 convenience function.
4376
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004377- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4378 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4379 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004380 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4381 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4382 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4383 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4384 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4385 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004386
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004387- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4388 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4389 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4390 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4391
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004392- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4393 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4394 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4395
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004396- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4397 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4398 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4399 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4400
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004401- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4402 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004403 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004404 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4405 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4406 new -l and -e options.
4407
4408- statcache is now deprecated.
4409
4410- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4411 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004412 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004413 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4414 time properly taken into account.
4415
4416- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4417 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4418 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4419 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4420
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004421Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004422-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004423
4424Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004425-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004426
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004427- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4428 is built with libdb3 if available.
4429
4430- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4431
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004432C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004433-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004434
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004435- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4436 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4437 PySequence_Size().
4438
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004439- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4440
4441- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4442 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4443 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4444
4445- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4446 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4447
4448- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4449 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4450
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004451New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004452-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004453
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004454- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4455 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4456
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004457- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4458 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4459
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004460- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4461
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004462Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004463-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004464
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004465- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4466 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4467
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004468Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004469-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004470
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004471Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004472----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004473
4474- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4475 removed completely in the next release.
4476
4477- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4478 OSX.
4479
4480- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4481 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4482
4483- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4484
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004485
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004486What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004487===========================
4488
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004489*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4490
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004491Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004492--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004493
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004494- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004495 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004496 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004497 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4498 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004499 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4500 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004501 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4502 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004503
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004504- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4505 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4506
4507- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4508 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4509
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004510Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004511-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004512
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004513- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4514 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4515 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4516 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4517 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4518 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4519 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4520 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4521
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004522- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4523 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4524 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4525 example).
4526
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004527- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004528 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004529 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004530 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004531
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004532- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4533 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4534 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004535 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004536
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004537- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4538 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4539 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4540 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4541 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4542 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4543
4544 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4545
4546 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4547
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004548Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004549-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004550
4551- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4552
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004553- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4554
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004555- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4556 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004557
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004558- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4559 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4560 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4561 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4562 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4563 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004564 attributes.
4565
4566- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4567 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4568 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004569
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004570- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4571 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4572 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004573
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004574- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4575 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4576 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004577 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4578 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4579
4580- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4581 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004582
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004583Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004584-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004585
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004586- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4587 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4588
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004589- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4590 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4591 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4592 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4593
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004594- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4595 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4596 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4597 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4598
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004599 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4600 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4601 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4602 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4603 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4604 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4605 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4606 without losing information).
4607
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004608- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004609 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4610 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4611 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4612 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4613 module).
4614
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004615 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004616 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4617 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4618 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4619 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004620
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004621- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004622 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4623 encoding.
4624
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004625- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4626 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4627
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004628- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004629 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4630
4631- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4632 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4633 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4634 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4635
4636- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4637
4638- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4639 ON, and OFF.
4640
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004641- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4642 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4643
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004644Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004645-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004646
4647- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4648 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4649 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004650
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004651- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4652 been added: -X and -E.
4653
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004654Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004655-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004656
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004657- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4658 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4659
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004660C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004661-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004662
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004663- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4664 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4665 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4666 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4667 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4668
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004669- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4670 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4671 as long) arguments.
4672
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004673- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4674 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4675 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4676 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4677 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4678 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4679
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004680- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4681 input.
4682
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004683New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004684-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004685
4686Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004687-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004688
4689Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004690-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004691
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004692- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4693 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4694 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4695
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004696- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4697 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4698 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004699 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004700
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004701 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4702 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4703 import signal
4704 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004705
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004706 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004707 while 1:
4708 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004709 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004710 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4711 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4712 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4713 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004714
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004715
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004716What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4717===========================
4718
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004719*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4720
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004721Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004722--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004723
4724- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4725 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4726 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4727
4728- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4729 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4730 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4731 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4732 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4733 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4734 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004735
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004736- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004737 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004738 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4739 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4740 associate a docstring with a property.
4741
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004742- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4743 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4744 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4745 other built-in object types.
4746
4747- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4748 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4749 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4750 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4751 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4752
4753- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4754 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4755
4756- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4757 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004758 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004759 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4760 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4761 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4762 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4763 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4764
4765- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4766 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4767 class.
4768
4769- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4770 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4771 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4772 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4773
4774- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4775 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4776 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4777 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4778
4779- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4780 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4781
4782- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4783 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4784 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4785 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4786 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004787 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004788 with the same value as s.
4789
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004790- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4791
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004792Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004793----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004794
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004795- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4796
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004797- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4798 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4799 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4800 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4801 objects.
4802
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004803- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4804 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004805 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4806 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4807
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004808- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4809 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4810 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4811
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004812Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004813-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004814
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004815- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4816 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4817 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4818 by the instances.
4819
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004820- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4821 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4822 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4823
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004824- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4825 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4826 before the entire comparison is complete.
4827
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004828- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4829 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4830 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4831
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004832- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4833 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4834 getwriter().
4835
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004836- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4837 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4838
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004839- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004840 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4841 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4842
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004843- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4844 iterable object.
4845
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004846- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4847 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004848
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004849- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4850 authentication.
4851
4852- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4853 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004854
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004855- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004856 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4857 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4858 a sample driver.)
4859
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004860Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004861-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004862
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004863- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4864 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4865 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4866 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4867 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4868 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4869 kernel has large file support.
4870
4871- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4872 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4873 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4874 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4875 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4876
4877- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4878 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4879 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4880
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004881C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004882-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004883
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004884- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4885 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4886
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004887New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004888-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004889
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004890- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4891 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4892
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004893Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004894-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004895
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004896- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4897 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4898 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4899 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4900 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4901
4902- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4903 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4904 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4905 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4906
4907- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4908 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4909
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004910Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004911-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004912
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004913- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004914 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4915 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004916
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004917
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004918What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4919===========================
4920
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004921*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4922
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004923Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004924----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004925
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004926- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4927 big to represent as a C double.
4928
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004929- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4930 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4931 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4932 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4933 restriction).
4934
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004935- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4936 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4937 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4938 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4939 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4940
4941 >>> dir([])
4942 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4943 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4944 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4945 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4946 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4947 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4948 'reverse', 'sort']
4949
4950 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4951
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004952- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004953 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4954 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4955 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4956 OverflowError exception.
4957
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004958- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004959 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004960 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4961 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4962 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4963 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4964 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004965 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004966 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4967 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4968
4969 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4970 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4971 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4972 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004973
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004974- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004975 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4976 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4977 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4978 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4979 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4980 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4981 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4982 once it is created.
4983
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004984- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4985 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4986 (key, value) pairs.
4987
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004988- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004989 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4990 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4991
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004992- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4993 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4994 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4995 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4996 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004997
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004998- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004999 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5000 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5001
5002 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5003
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005004- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005005 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5006
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005007Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005008-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005009
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005010- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005011 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5012 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005013
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005014- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5015 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5016 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5017 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5018 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5019 in this area anymore).
5020
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005021- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5022 threading.Timer.
5023
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005024- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5025 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5026
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005027- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005028 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5029
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005030- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005031 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5032 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5033 converted to Python longs.
5034
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005035- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005036 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5037
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005038- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5039 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5040 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5041
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005042Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005043-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005044
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005045- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5046 division operators as per PEP 238.
5047
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005048Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005049-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005050
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005051- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5052 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5053 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5054 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5055
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005056C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005057-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005058
5059- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005060
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005061- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5062 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005063 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005064
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005065 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5066 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005067 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005068 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005069
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005070- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005071 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5072 module:
5073
5074 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005075
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005076 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5077 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005078
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005079 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5080 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005081
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005082 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5083
5084 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5085
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005086- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005087 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5088 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5089 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005090
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005091New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005092-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005093
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005094- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5095 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5096 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5097 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5098 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005099
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005100Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005101-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005102
5103Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005104-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005105
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005106- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5107 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5108 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5109 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005110 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5111 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5112 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5113 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5114 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005115
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005116- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005117 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5118
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005119
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005120What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5121===========================
5122
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005123*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5124
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005125Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005126-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005127
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005128- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5129 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5130
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005131- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5132 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5133 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005134
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005135- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5136 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5137 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5138 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005139
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005140- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5141
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005142- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005143
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005144Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005145-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005146
5147- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005148 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005149 the module docstring for details.
5150
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005151Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005152-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005153
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005154- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005155 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5156 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5157 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005158
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005159- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5160 Nick Mathewson.
5161
5162Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005163----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005164
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005165- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5166 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5167 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5168 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5169 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5170 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5171 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5172 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5173
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005174- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5175 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5176 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5177 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5178
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005179- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5180 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5181 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5182 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5183 come a long way).
5184
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005185- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5186 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5187 write filters for these warnings).
5188
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005189- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5190 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5191 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5192 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5193 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5194
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005195- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5196 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5197 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5198 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5199 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5200 older distribution.
5201
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005202Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005203-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005204
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005205- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5206 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005207 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005208
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005209- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5210 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5211 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5212
5213- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5214
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005215- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5216
5217- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5218
5219- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5220
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005221- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005222
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005223- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5224
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005225New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005226-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005227
5228C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005229-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005230
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005231- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5232 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5233 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5234 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5235 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5236 against buffer overruns.
5237
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005238- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005239 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5240 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005241 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5242 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5243 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5244
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005245- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5246 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5247 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5248 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5249 deprecated.
5250
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005251Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005252-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005253
5254- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5255 relevant is found.
5256
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005257
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005258What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005259===========================
5260
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005261*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5262
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005263Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005264----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005265
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005266- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5267 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5268 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5269 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5270 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5271 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5272 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5273 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005274 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005275 repaired.
5276
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005277- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005278 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005279 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5280 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5281 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5282 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5283 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5284 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5285 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5286 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5287
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005288- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5289 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5290 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5291 leading BMO character).
5292
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005293- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5294 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5295 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5296
5297 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5298 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5299 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005300
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005301 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5302 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5303 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5304 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5305 for various simple to use conversions.
5306
5307 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5308 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5309
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005310 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5311 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5312 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5313 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5314 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5315 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5316 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5317 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5318 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5319 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5320 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5321 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5322 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5323 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5324 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005325
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005326- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5327 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5328 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005329 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005330 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005331
5332 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005333 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5334 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5335 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5336 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5337 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005338 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5339 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005340
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005341 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5342 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5343 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005344 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005345
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005346- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5347 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5348 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5349 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5350 floating arithmetic,
5351
5352 x = 9007199254740992.0
5353 print long(x)
5354
5355 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5356 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5357 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5358 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5359 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5360 functions are of good quality).
5361
5362 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5363 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5364 algorithms to break.
5365
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005366- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5367 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5368 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5369 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5370 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5371 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5372 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5373 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5374 order.
5375
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005376- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5377 operation along the most common code paths.
5378
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005379- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5380 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5381
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005382- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5383 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5384 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5385 {}.update(UserDict())
5386
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005387- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5388 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5389 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5390 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5391 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5392 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5393 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5394 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5395
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005396- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005397 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005398
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005399 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005400 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5401 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005402 join() method of strings
5403 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005404 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5405 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005406 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005407 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005408
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005409- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5410 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5411
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005412- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5413 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5414
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005415- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5416 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5417 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5418 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5419
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005420- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5421 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005422 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005423 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5424 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005425
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005426- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5427
5428
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005429Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005430-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005431
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005432- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005433 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005434 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5435 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5436
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005437- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5438 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5439
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005440- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5441 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5442 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5443 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5444
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005445- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5446 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5447 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5448
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005449- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5450
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005451- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5452
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005453- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5454 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5455 that are still imported into string.py).
5456
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005457- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5458
5459- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5460 Now it does.
5461
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005462- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5463
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005464- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5465 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5466 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5467 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5468 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005469 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5470 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005471
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005472- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5473 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5474 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5475 'help(object)'.
5476
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005477Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005478-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005479
5480- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005481 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005482 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5483 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5484
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005485- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005486 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5487 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005488
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005489C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005490-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005491
5492- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5493 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005494
5495----
5496
5497**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**