blob: 3ad50b5df486da9bb9000e855687cdd89db691a4 [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2006*
11
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000012Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Brett Cannona7446e32006-02-27 23:39:10 +000015- Properly check if 'warnings' raises an exception (usually when a filter set
16 to "error" is triggered) when raising a warning for raising string
17 exceptions.
18
Neal Norwitz0023a2f2006-02-27 23:24:48 +000019- CO_GENERATOR_ALLOWED is no longer defined, this behavior is the default.
20 The name was removed from Include/code.h.
21
Neal Norwitzeb651252006-02-27 16:47:12 +000022- PEP 308: conditional expressions were added (x if cond else y).
23
Guido van Rossum1968ad32006-02-25 22:38:04 +000024- Patch 1433928:
25 - The copy module now "copies" function objects (as atomic objects).
26 - dict.__getitem__ now looks for a __missing__ hook before raising
27 KeyError.
28
Guido van Rossumc2e20742006-02-27 22:32:47 +000029- PEP 343: with statement implemented.
30
Marc-André Lemburgfe4b34c2006-02-19 15:22:22 +000031- Fix the encodings package codec search function to only search
32 inside its own package. Fixes problem reported in patch #1433198.
33
34 Note: Codec packages should implement and register their own
35 codec search function. PEP 100 has the details.
36
Martin v. Löwis18e16552006-02-15 17:27:45 +000037- PEP 353: Using ssize_t as the index type.
38
Neal Norwitzfc76d632006-01-10 06:03:13 +000039- Patch #1400181, fix unicode string formatting to not use the locale.
40 This is how string objects work. u'%f' could use , instead of .
41 for the decimal point. Now both strings and unicode always use periods.
42
Neal Norwitz671b9e32006-01-09 07:07:12 +000043- Bug #1244610, #1392915, fix build problem on OpenBSD 3.7 and 3.8.
44 configure would break checking curses.h.
45
Georg Brandlcd4d1e82005-12-27 17:37:07 +000046- Bug #959576: The pwd module is now builtin. This allows Python to be
47 built on UNIX platforms without $HOME set.
48
Neal Norwitzc10978f2005-12-19 06:07:16 +000049- Bug #1072182, fix some potential problems if characters are signed.
50
Neal Norwitz5d0ad502005-12-19 04:27:42 +000051- Bug #889500, fix line number on SyntaxWarning for global declarations.
52
Neal Norwitzdb83eb32005-12-18 05:29:30 +000053- Bug #1378022, UTF-8 files with a leading BOM crashed the interpreter.
54
Neal Norwitze7214a12005-12-18 05:03:17 +000055- Support for converting hex strings to floats no longer works.
56 This was not portable. float('0x3') now raises a ValueError.
57
Barry Warsaw2a38a862005-12-18 01:27:35 +000058- Patch #1382163: Expose Subversion revision number to Python. New C API
59 function Py_GetBuildNumber(). New attribute sys.build_number. Build number
60 is now displayed in interactive prompt banner.
61
Georg Brandlfa166682005-12-17 21:45:17 +000062- Implementation of PEP 341 - Unification of try/except and try/finally.
63 "except" clauses can now be written together with a "finally" clause in
Neal Norwitz11ca77e2005-12-17 22:24:12 +000064 one try statement instead of two nested ones. Patch #1355913.
Georg Brandlfa166682005-12-17 21:45:17 +000065
Hye-Shik Chang835b2432005-12-17 04:38:31 +000066- Bug #1379994: Builtin unicode_escape and raw_unicode_escape codec
67 now encodes backslash correctly.
68
Martin v. Löwisb45b3152005-11-28 17:34:23 +000069- Patch #1350409: Work around signal handling bug in Visual Studio 2005.
70
Georg Brandlf06e30a2005-11-24 15:37:42 +000071- Bug #1281408: Py_BuildValue now works correct even with unsigned longs
72 and long longs.
73
Neal Norwitz67715f02005-11-09 06:59:35 +000074- SF Bug #1350188, "setdlopenflags" leads to crash upon "import"
75 It was possible dlerror() returns a NULL pointer, use a default error
76 message in this case.
77
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +000078- Replaced most Unicode charmap codecs with new ones using the
79 new Unicode translate string feature in the builtin charmap
80 codec; the codecs were created from the mapping tables available
81 at ftp.unicode.org and contain a few updates (e.g. the Mac OS
82 encodings now include a mapping for the Apple logo)
83
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +000084- Added a few more codecs for Mac OS encodings
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +000085
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +000086- Speed up some Unicode operations.
87
Martin v. Löwisbd260da2006-02-26 19:42:26 +000088- A new AST parser implementation was completed. The abstract
89 syntax tree is available for read-only (non-compile) access
Martin v. Löwis577b5b92006-02-27 15:23:19 +000090 to Python code; an _ast module was added.
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +000091
Neal Norwitzb6570f52005-10-21 06:26:10 +000092- SF bug #1167751: fix incorrect code being for generator expressions.
Neal Norwitz16af7342005-10-21 06:25:33 +000093 The following code now raises a SyntaxError: foo(a = i for i in range(10))
94
Neal Norwitz708e51a2005-10-03 04:48:15 +000095- SF Bug #976608: fix SystemError when mtime of an imported file is -1.
96
Neal Norwitz11bd1192005-10-03 00:54:56 +000097- SF Bug #887946: fix segfault when redirecting stdin from a directory.
98 Provide a warning when a directory is passed on the command line.
99
Neal Norwitz40d37812005-10-02 01:48:49 +0000100- Fix segfault with invalid coding.
101
102- SF bug #772896: unknown encoding results in MemoryError.
103
Raymond Hettinger6b27cda2005-09-24 21:23:05 +0000104- All iterators now have a Boolean value of true. Formerly, some iterators
105 supported a __len__() method which evaluated to False when the iterator
106 was empty.
107
Guido van Rossum630db602005-09-20 18:49:54 +0000108- On 64-bit platforms, when __len__() returns a value that cannot be
109 represented as a C int, raise OverflowError.
110
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +0000111- test__locale is skipped on OS X < 10.4 (only partial locale support is
Walter Dörwald6611a8b2005-10-09 19:28:35 +0000112 present).
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +0000113
Georg Brandl80bbf3f2005-09-14 19:38:29 +0000114- SF bug #893549: parsing keyword arguments was broken with a few format
115 codes.
116
Guido van Rossum8ee3e5a2005-09-14 18:09:42 +0000117- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on AIX 5.3
118 with IBM's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1284289). This also closes SF
119 bug #105470: test_pwd fails on 64bit system (Opteron).
120
Guido van Rossum539c6622005-09-14 17:49:54 +0000121- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on HP-UX 11 on
122 Itanium2 with HP's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1225212).
123
Georg Brandl4550b8d2005-08-26 06:43:52 +0000124- Disallow keyword arguments for type constructors that don't use them
Georg Brandl02c42872005-08-26 06:42:30 +0000125 (fixes bug #1119418).
126
Martin v. Löwisd35edda2005-08-24 08:39:24 +0000127- Forward UnicodeDecodeError into SyntaxError for source encoding errors.
128
Barry Warsawe2eca0b2005-08-15 18:14:19 +0000129- SF bug #900092: When tracing (e.g. for hotshot), restore 'return' events for
130 exceptions that cause a function to exit.
131
Raymond Hettinger9f1a6792005-07-31 01:16:36 +0000132- The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
133 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
134 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
135
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +0000136- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
137
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +0000138- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
139 reference counts in some error exit cases.
140
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000141- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
142 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
143 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
144 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
145 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
146 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
147 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
148 realloc.
149
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +0000150- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
151 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
152
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +0000153- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
154 like their int counterparts.
155
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +0000156- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
157 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
158 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
159 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
160 for a longer write-up of the problem).
161
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +0000162- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
163 serializing floats.
164
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +0000165- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
166 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
167 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
168
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +0000169- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
170 278.
171
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000172- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
173 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
174 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
175 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000176 to the base class has been moved to the proper nb_* magic slot and out of
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000177 PyNumber_*().
178 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
179
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +0000180- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
181 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
182 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
183 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
184
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +0000185- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
186 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
187 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
188 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
189 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
190
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +0000191- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
192 disabled caused a crash.
193
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000194- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
195 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
196
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000197- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +0000198 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
199
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +0000200- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
201
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000202- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +0000203 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
204 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
205 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000206
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +0000207- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
208
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +0000209- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
210 returning None.
211
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000212- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +0000213 ('\') with a specific error message.
214
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +0000215- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
216
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +0000217- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
218 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
219
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000220- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000221 an ferror() call.
222
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000223- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
224 list.sort().
225
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000226- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
227 (2+3) --> (5).
228
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000229- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
230
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000231- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
232 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000233
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000234- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
235 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
236 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
237
Neil Schemenauercf52c072005-08-12 17:34:58 +0000238- Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a
239 unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and
240 calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance.
241
Tim Petersf4e69282006-02-27 17:15:31 +0000242- Patch #1413181: changed ``PyThreadState_Delete()`` to forget about the
243 current thread state when the auto-GIL-state machinery knows about
244 it (since the thread state is being deleted, continuing to remember it
245 can't help, but can hurt if another thread happens to get created with
246 the same thread id).
247
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000248Extension Modules
249-----------------
250
Guido van Rossum1968ad32006-02-25 22:38:04 +0000251- Patch 1433928: Added a new type, defaultdict, to the collections module.
252 This uses the new __missing__ hook behavior added to dict (see above).
253
Georg Brandldbd83392006-02-20 09:42:33 +0000254- Bug #854823: socketmodule now builds on Sun platforms even when
255 INET_ADDRSTRLEN is not defined.
256
Georg Brandlf4f44152006-02-18 22:29:33 +0000257- Patch #1393157: os.startfile() now has an optional argument to specify
258 a "command verb" to invoke on the file.
259
Neal Norwitz082b2df2006-02-07 07:04:46 +0000260- Bug #876637, prevent stack corruption when socket descriptor
261 is larger than FD_SETSIZE.
262
Neal Norwitz0e6bc8c2006-02-05 05:45:43 +0000263- Patch #1407135, bug #1424041: harmonize mmap behavior of anonymous memory.
264 mmap.mmap(-1, size) now returns anonymous memory in both Unix and Windows.
265 mmap.mmap(0, size) should not be used on Windows for anonymous memory.
266
Martin v. Löwis57a34e82006-02-04 19:12:37 +0000267- Patch #1422385: The nis module now supports access to domains other
268 than the system default domain.
269
Martin v. Löwis14694662006-02-03 12:54:16 +0000270- Use Win32 API to implement os.stat/fstat. As a result, subsecond timestamps
271 are reported, the limit on path name lengths is removed, and stat reports
272 WindowsError now (instead of OSError).
273
Gregory P. Smithcfc4a8d2006-01-29 19:46:23 +0000274- Add bsddb.db.DBEnv.set_tx_timestamp allowing time based database recovery.
275
Neal Norwitz62a21122006-01-25 05:21:55 +0000276- Bug #1413192, fix seg fault in bsddb if a transaction was deleted
277 before the env.
278
Martin v. Löwis11017b12006-01-14 18:12:57 +0000279- Patch #1103116: Basic AF_NETLINK support.
280
Neal Norwitz3b4fff82006-01-11 08:54:45 +0000281- Bug #1402308, (possible) segfault when using mmap.mmap(-1, ...)
282
Neal Norwitz88bbd732006-01-10 07:05:44 +0000283- Bug #1400822, _curses over{lay,write} doesn't work when passing 6 ints.
284 Also fix ungetmouse() which did not accept arguments properly.
285 The code now conforms to the documented signature.
286
Neal Norwitz5e3d8622006-01-09 06:24:35 +0000287- Bug #1400115, Fix segfault when calling curses.panel.userptr()
288 without prior setting of the userptr.
289
Neal Norwitz40c6b472006-01-05 05:43:35 +0000290- Fix 64-bit problems in bsddb.
291
Neal Norwitz8856fb72005-12-18 03:34:22 +0000292- Patch #1365916: fix some unsafe 64-bit mmap methods.
293
Hye-Shik Changc5c57e62005-12-12 11:48:32 +0000294- Bug #1290333: Added a workaround for cjkcodecs' _codecs_cn build
295 problem on AIX.
296
Georg Brandla13c2442005-11-22 19:30:31 +0000297- Bug #869197: os.setgroups rejects long integer arguments
298
Neal Norwitz0f46bbf2005-11-03 05:00:25 +0000299- Bug #1346533, select.poll() doesn't raise an error if timeout > sys.maxint
300
Neal Norwitz7b631792005-11-02 05:26:07 +0000301- Bug #1344508, Fix UNIX mmap leaking file descriptors
302
Neal Norwitzf3396542005-10-28 05:52:22 +0000303- Patch #1338314, Bug #1336623: fix tarfile so it can extract
304 REGTYPE directories from tarfiles written by old programs.
305
Gregory P. Smithe101df92006-01-24 20:09:45 +0000306- Patch #1407992, fixes broken bsddb module db associate when using
307 BerkeleyDB 3.3, 4.0 or 4.1.
308
309- Get bsddb module to build with BerkeleyDB version 4.4
310
311- Get bsddb module to build with BerkeleyDB version 3.2
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +0000312
Neal Norwitz484d9a42005-09-30 04:46:49 +0000313- Patch #1309009, Fix segfault in pyexpat when the XML document is in latin_1,
314 but Python incorrectly assumes it is in UTF-8 format
315
Georg Brandle677adc2005-09-29 13:40:49 +0000316- Fix parse errors in the readline module when compiling without threads.
317
Hye-Shik Chang9ceebd52005-09-24 14:58:47 +0000318- Patch #1288833: Removed thread lock from socket.getaddrinfo on
319 FreeBSD 5.3 and later versions which got thread-safe getaddrinfo(3).
320
Michael W. Hudson10402a32005-09-22 09:19:01 +0000321- Patches #1298449 and #1298499: Add some missing checks for error
322 returns in cStringIO.c.
323
Neal Norwitz058bde12005-09-21 06:44:25 +0000324- Patch #1297028: fix segfault if call type on MultibyteCodec,
325 MultibyteStreamReader, or MultibyteStreamWriter
326
Neal Norwitzcfe7dd92005-09-19 06:49:27 +0000327- Fix memory leak in posix.access().
328
Martin v. Löwis8b291e22005-09-18 08:17:56 +0000329- Patch #1213831: Fix typo in unicodedata._getcode.
330
Georg Brandlfb1ef852005-09-14 20:53:32 +0000331- Bug #1007046: os.startfile() did not accept unicode strings encoded in
332 the file system encoding.
333
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000334- Patch #756021: Special-case socket.inet_aton('255.255.255.255') for
335 platforms that don't have inet_aton().
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000336
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000337- Bug #1215928: Fix bz2.BZ2File.seek() for 64-bit file offsets.
338
339- Bug #1191043: Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines for files containing one
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000340 line without newlines.
341
Georg Brandl38387b82005-08-24 07:17:40 +0000342- Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did
343 on Windows.
344
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000345- Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
Martin v. Löwisebd9d5b2005-08-09 15:00:59 +0000346 st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
347
Michael W. Hudson8137bea2005-07-27 20:24:40 +0000348- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
349 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
350 for large or negative values.
351
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000352- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000353 implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false.
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000354
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000355- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
356
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000357- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
358 if available on the platform.
359
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000360- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
361 available on the platform.
362
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000363- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
364 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
365
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000366- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
367
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000368- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
369 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
370 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
371
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000372- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
373
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000374- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
375 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
376
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000377- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000378 file size.
379
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000380- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
381
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000382- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
383 {remove_history,replace_history}
384
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000385- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
386 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000387
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000388- stat_float_times is now True.
389
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000390- array.array objects are now picklable.
391
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000392- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
393 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
394
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000395- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
396 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
397 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
398
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000399- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
400 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000401
402Library
403-------
404
Martin v. Löwis415ed932006-02-27 19:56:30 +0000405- The compiler package now supports future imports after the module docstring.
406
Georg Brandl8f7c54e2006-02-20 08:40:38 +0000407- Bug #1413790: zipfile now sanitizes absolute archive names that are
408 not allowed by the specs.
409
410- Bug #1413790: zipfile now sanitizes absolute archive names that are
411 not allowed by the specs.
412
Georg Brandlc98eeed2006-02-19 14:57:47 +0000413- Patch #1215184: FileInput now can be given an opening hook which can
414 be used to control how files are opened.
415
Georg Brandlc029f872006-02-19 14:12:34 +0000416- Patch #1212287: fileinput.input() now has a mode parameter for
417 specifying the file mode input files should be opened with.
418
Georg Brandl67e9fb92006-02-19 13:56:17 +0000419- Patch #1215184: fileinput now has a fileno() function for getting the
420 current file number.
421
Georg Brandl602b9ba2006-02-19 13:26:36 +0000422- Patch #1349274: gettext.install() now optionally installs additional
423 translation functions other than _() in the builtin namespace.
424
Georg Brandle4662172006-02-19 09:51:27 +0000425- Patch #1337756: fileinput now accepts Unicode filenames.
426
Georg Brandl7b4e7c22006-02-18 21:10:56 +0000427- Patch #1373643: The chunk module can now read chunks larger than
428 two gigabytes.
429
Georg Brandl21dd1af2006-02-17 13:35:13 +0000430- Patch #1417555: SimpleHTTPServer now returns Last-Modified headers.
431
Georg Brandlbd3bc4d2006-02-17 09:52:53 +0000432- Bug #1430298: It is now possible to send a mail with an empty
433 return address using smtplib.
434
Georg Brandl0e1abe22006-02-17 09:48:14 +0000435- Bug #1432260: The names of lambda functions are now properly displayed
436 in pydoc.
Georg Brandl501dd0d2006-02-17 09:45:40 +0000437
Martin v. Löwis00756902006-02-05 17:09:41 +0000438- Patch #1412872: zipfile now sets the creator system to 3 (Unix)
439 unless the system is Win32.
440
Tim Petersda1329b2006-02-27 16:50:01 +0000441- Patch #1349118: urllib now supports user:pass@ style proxy
Martin v. Löwis3e865952006-01-24 15:51:21 +0000442 specifications, raises IOErrors when proxies for unsupported protocols
443 are defined, and uses the https proxy on https redirections.
444
Georg Brandl531ceba2006-01-21 07:20:56 +0000445- Bug #902075: urllib2 now supports 'host:port' style proxy specifications.
446
447- Bug #1407902: Add support for sftp:// URIs to urlparse.
Georg Brandl89f35ac2006-01-20 17:24:23 +0000448
Georg Brandlb709c2c2006-01-20 09:07:35 +0000449- Bug #1371247: Update Windows locale identifiers in locale.py.
450
Neal Norwitzf60cd472006-01-14 07:05:13 +0000451- Bug #1394565: SimpleHTTPServer now doesn't choke on query parameters
Georg Brandl45ab2332006-01-13 17:05:56 +0000452 any more.
Georg Brandlb709c2c2006-01-20 09:07:35 +0000453
Georg Brandl4edd9892006-01-13 16:59:46 +0000454- Bug #1403410: The warnings module now doesn't get confused
455 when it can't find out the module name it generates a warning for.
Georg Brandlb709c2c2006-01-20 09:07:35 +0000456
Martin v. Löwis412ed3b2006-01-08 10:45:39 +0000457- Patch #1177307: Added a new codec utf_8_sig for UTF-8 with a BOM signature.
458
Neal Norwitzab86f8e2005-12-23 21:44:36 +0000459- Patch #1157027: cookielib mishandles RFC 2109 cookies in Netscape mode
460
Neal Norwitz338e7862005-12-23 21:27:46 +0000461- Patch #1117398: cookielib.LWPCookieJar and .MozillaCookieJar now raise
462 LoadError as documented, instead of IOError. For compatibility,
463 LoadError subclasses IOError.
464
Brett Cannon3cbd0382005-12-16 22:49:23 +0000465- Added the hashlib module. It provides secure hash functions for MD5 and
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000466 SHA1, 224, 256, 384, and 512. Note that recent developments make the
467 historic MD5 and SHA1 unsuitable for cryptographic-strength applications.
468 In <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-December/058850.html>
469 Ronald L. Rivest offered this advice for Python:
470
471 "The consensus of researchers in this area (at least as
472 expressed at the NIST Hash Function Workshop 10/31/05),
473 is that SHA-256 is a good choice for the time being, but
474 that research should continue, and other alternatives may
475 arise from this research. The larger SHA's also seem OK."
Brett Cannon3cbd0382005-12-16 22:49:23 +0000476
Fredrik Lundh7e0aef02005-12-12 18:54:55 +0000477- Added a subset of Fredrik Lundh's ElementTree package. Available
478 modules are xml.etree.ElementTree, xml.etree.ElementPath, and
479 xml.etree.ElementInclude, from ElementTree 1.2.6.
480
Martin v. Löwis307021f2005-11-27 16:59:04 +0000481- Patch #1162825: Support non-ASCII characters in IDLE window titles.
482
Georg Brandl1f663572005-11-26 16:50:44 +0000483- Bug #1365984: urllib now opens "data:" URLs again.
484
Brett Cannonad07ff22005-11-23 02:15:50 +0000485- Patch #1314396: prevent deadlock for threading.Thread.join() when an exception
486 is raised within the method itself on a previous call (e.g., passing in an
487 illegal argument)
488
Brett Cannon5d0bf942005-11-02 23:04:26 +0000489- Bug #1340337: change time.strptime() to always return ValueError when there
490 is an error in the format string.
491
Georg Brandle8f24432005-10-03 14:16:44 +0000492- Patch #754022: Greatly enhanced webbrowser.py (by Oleg Broytmann).
493
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000494- Bug #729103: pydoc.py: Fix docother() method to accept additional
Georg Brandl8b813db2005-10-01 16:32:31 +0000495 "parent" argument.
496
Georg Brandlaa935172005-09-29 20:49:16 +0000497- Patch #1300515: xdrlib.py: Fix pack_fstring() to really use null bytes
498 for padding.
499
Georg Brandl80ba8e82005-09-29 20:16:07 +0000500- Bug #1296004: httplib.py: Limit maximal amount of data read from the
501 socket to avoid a MemoryError on Windows.
502
Matthias Klosef3f231f2005-09-20 07:02:49 +0000503- Patch #1166948: locale.py: Prefer LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE and LANG over LANGUAGE
504 to get the correct encoding.
505
506- Patch #1166938: locale.py: Parse LANGUAGE as a colon separated list of
507 languages.
508
Martin v. Löwis4ed67382005-09-18 08:34:39 +0000509- Patch #1268314: Cache lines in StreamReader.readlines for performance.
510
Brett Cannona783d062005-09-15 02:34:56 +0000511- Bug #1290505: Fix clearing the regex cache for time.strptime().
512
Martin v. Löwis5dbdc592005-08-27 10:07:56 +0000513- Bug #1167128: Fix size of a symlink in a tarfile to be 0.
514
Georg Brandl5a650a22005-08-26 08:51:34 +0000515- Patch #810023: Fix off-by-one bug in urllib.urlretrieve reporthook
516 functionality.
517
Martin v. Löwis8b595142005-08-25 11:03:38 +0000518- Bug #1163178: Make IDNA return an empty string when the input is empty.
519
Georg Brandl532efab2005-08-24 22:34:21 +0000520- Patch #848017: Make Cookie more RFC-compliant. Use CRLF as default output
521 separator and do not output trailing semicola.
522
Georg Brandlb9256022005-08-24 18:46:39 +0000523- Patch #1062060: urllib.urlretrieve() now raises a new exception, named
524 ContentTooShortException, when the actually downloaded size does not
525 match the Content-Length header.
526
Martin v. Löwis0a5d4a22005-08-24 14:55:22 +0000527- Bug #1121494: distutils.dir_utils.mkpath now accepts Unicode strings.
528
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000529- Bug #1178484: Return complete lines from codec stream readers
530 even if there is an exception in later lines, resulting in
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000531 correct line numbers for decoding errors in source code.
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000532
Georg Brandl6d2b3462005-08-24 07:36:17 +0000533- Bug #1192315: Disallow negative arguments to clear() in pdb.
534
Martin v. Löwisb813c532005-08-07 20:51:04 +0000535- Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
536
Georg Brandl649f8e72005-08-03 07:30:12 +0000537- Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
538 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
539
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000540- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
541 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
542 Tkdnd.
543
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000544- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
545 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
546
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000547- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
548 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
549
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000550- textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000551 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
552
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000553- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
554 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
555
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000556- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
557 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
558
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000559- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000560 it can be missing in embedded interpreters
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000561
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000562- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
563
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000564- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
565 error messages.
566
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000567- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
568
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000569- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
570 Bug #1224621.
571
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000572- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
573 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
574 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
575 terminates by raising StopIteration.
576
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000577- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
578
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000579- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
580 component of the path.
581
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000582- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
583 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
584 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
585 class at all.
586
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000587- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
588 files to PyPI.
589
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000590- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
591 them to PyPI.
592
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000593- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
594 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
595 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
596 work as expected.
597
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000598- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
599 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
600
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000601- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000602 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
603
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000604- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
605
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000606- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
607 to build.
608
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000609- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
610 symbolic links on Windows.
611
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000612- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000613 profile.py if available.
614
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000615- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
616
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000617- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
618 in LWPCookieJar.
619
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000620- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
621
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000622- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
623
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000624- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
625
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000626- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
627
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000628- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
629
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000630- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
631
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000632- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
633
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000634- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
635
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000636- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
637 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
638 be exploited in various ways.
639
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000640- Bug #1222790: in SimpleXMLRPCServer, set the reuse-address and close-on-exec
Andrew M. Kuchling3a976052005-12-04 15:07:41 +0000641 flags on the HTTP listening socket.
642
Andrew M. Kuchlinge63fde72005-12-04 15:36:57 +0000643- Bug #792570: SimpleXMLRPCServer had problems if the request grew too large.
644 Fixed by reading the HTTP body in chunks instead of one big socket.read().
645
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000646- Patches #893642, #1039083: add allow_none, encoding arguments to constructors of
Andrew M. Kuchling10a16de2005-12-04 16:34:40 +0000647 SimpleXMLRPCServer and CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler.
648
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000649- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
650
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000651- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
652
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000653- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
654
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000655- Enhancements to the csv module:
656
657 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000658 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000659 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000660 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
661 reporting.
662 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
663 dictates.
664 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000665 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000666 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000667 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
668 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000669 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
670 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000671 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000672 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
673 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
674 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
675 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
676 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
677 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
678 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
679 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
680 without first creating a dialect class.
681 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
682 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
683 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000684 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000685 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
686 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000687 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
688 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
689 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
690 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000691 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
692 This has been fixed.
693
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000694- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
695 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
696 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
697 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
698
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000699- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
700
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000701- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
702 (Bug #951915).
703
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000704- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
705 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
706 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000707 encoding alias table.
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000708
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000709- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
710
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000711- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
712 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
713
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000714- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
715
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000716- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
717
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000718- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
719
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000720- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
721
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000722- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
723
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000724- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
725 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
726 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
727
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000728- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000729 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000730
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000731- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
732 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
733 tokenizer with very long source lines.
734
Barry Warsaw538561e2006-01-01 21:48:54 +0000735- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called
736 immediately after creating the object, without any intervening
737 ``.decompress()`` calls.
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000738
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000739- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
740 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000741
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000742- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
743 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
744
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000745- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
746 correctly.
747
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000748- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
749 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
750 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
751 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
752 between two lines.
753
Walter Dörwalda47d1c02005-08-30 10:23:14 +0000754- Bug #1251300: On UCS-4 builds the "unicode-internal" codec will now complain
755 about illegal code points. The codec now supports PEP 293 style error
756 handlers.
757
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000758- Bug #1235646: ``codecs.StreamRecoder.next()`` now reencodes the data it reads
Walter Dörwaldc5238b82005-09-01 11:56:53 +0000759 from the input stream, so that the output is a byte string in the correct
760 encoding instead of a unicode string.
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000761
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000762- Bug #1202493: Fixing SRE parser to handle '{}' as perl does, rather than
763 considering it exactly like a '*'.
764
Walter Dörwald007f8df2005-10-09 19:42:27 +0000765- Bug #1245379: Add "unicode-1-1-utf-7" as an alias for "utf-7" to
766 ``encodings.aliases``.
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000767
Walter Dörwald09f0dd52005-11-21 19:10:07 +0000768- ` uu.encode()`` and ``uu.decode()`` now support unicode filenames.
769
Gustavo Niemeyer548148812006-01-31 18:34:13 +0000770- Patch #1413711: Certain patterns of differences were making difflib
771 touch the recursion limit.
772
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000773Build
774-----
775
Martin v. Löwis86d66262006-02-17 08:40:11 +0000776- Patch #1432345: Make python compile on DragonFly.
777
Martin v. Löwis856bf9a2006-02-14 20:42:55 +0000778- Build support for Win64-AMD64 was added.
779
Martin v. Löwisa55e55e2006-02-11 15:55:14 +0000780- Patch #1428494: Prefer linking against ncursesw over ncurses library.
781
Martin v. Löwisfd9a72a2006-01-08 10:07:33 +0000782- Patch #881820: look for openpty and forkpty also in libbsd.
783
Martin v. Löwis64c33dd2006-01-03 07:42:14 +0000784- The sources of zlib are now part of the Python distribution (zlib 1.2.3).
785 The zlib module is now builtin on Windows.
786
Martin v. Löwisd5845ec2005-12-30 12:31:38 +0000787- Use -xcode=pic32 for CCSHARED on Solaris with SunPro.
788
Martin v. Löwis147fbe52005-08-07 21:09:30 +0000789- Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
790 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
791
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000792- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
793 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
794
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000795- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
796 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
797 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000798 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000799
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000800- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
801 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
802 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
803
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000804- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
805
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000806- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
807 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
808
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000809- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
810 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
811 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
812 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
813 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
814 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
815 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
816 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
817
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000818- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
819 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
820 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
821 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
822
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000823C API
824-----
825
Raymond Hettingerbeb31012005-08-16 03:47:52 +0000826- Added a C API for set and frozenset objects.
827
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000828- Removed PyRange_New().
829
Walter Dörwaldd1c1e102005-10-06 20:29:57 +0000830- Patch #1313939: PyUnicode_DecodeCharmap() accepts a unicode string as the
831 mapping argument now. This string is used as a mapping table. Byte values
832 greater than the length of the string and 0xFFFE are treated as undefined
833 mappings.
834
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000835
836Tests
837-----
838
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000839- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000840
Hye-Shik Changaaa2f1d2005-12-10 17:44:27 +0000841- Patch #1276356: New resource "urlfetch" is implemented. This enables
842 even impatient people to run tests that require remote files.
843
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000844
845Documentation
846-------------
847
Georg Brandl8cb30772006-01-20 09:34:29 +0000848- Bug #1402224: Add warning to dl docs about crashes.
849
Georg Brandla3a93ae2006-01-20 09:14:36 +0000850- Bug #1396471: Document that Windows' ftell() can return invalid
851 values for text files with UNIX-style line endings.
852
Georg Brandl32252422005-09-14 20:42:00 +0000853- Bug #1274828: Document os.path.splitunc().
854
Georg Brandl79c122f2005-08-24 07:31:33 +0000855- Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py.
856
Georg Brandl6f2bbd32005-08-24 07:26:55 +0000857- Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation.
858
Georg Brandlf13c4ba2005-08-02 10:28:08 +0000859- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
860
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000861- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
862
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000863- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
864
865- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
866
867- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
868
869- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
870
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000871- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
872 Closes bug #1166582.
873
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000874- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
875 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
876 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
877
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000878Mac
879---
880
881
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000882New platforms
883-------------
884
885- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
886
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000887
888Tools/Demos
889-----------
890
Georg Brandl56897312005-08-24 18:32:30 +0000891- Added two new files to Tools/scripts: pysource.py, which recursively
892 finds Python source files, and findnocoding.py, which finds Python
893 source files that need an encoding declaration.
894 Patch #784089, credits to Oleg Broytmann.
895
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000896- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
897
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000898- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000899
Barry Warsaw538561e2006-01-01 21:48:54 +0000900- Fixed a display glitch in Pynche, which could cause the right arrow to
901 wiggle over by a pixel.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000902
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000903What's New in Python 2.4 final?
904===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000905
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000906*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000907
908Core and builtins
909-----------------
910
911- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
912 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
913 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
914
915
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000916What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
917==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000918
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000919*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000920
921Core and builtins
922-----------------
923
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000924- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
925 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
926 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
927
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000928
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000929Library
930-------
931
932- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
933 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
934 raised is re-raised.
935
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000936- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
937 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
938
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000939- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
940 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
941 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
942 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
943 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
944 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
945 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
946 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
947 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
948 by the slice are recomputed now.
949
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000950- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000951
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000952Build
953-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000954
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000955- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
956 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
957 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000958
959C API
960-----
961
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000962- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
963
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000964
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000965What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
966================================
967
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000968*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000969
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000970License
971-------
972
973The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
974is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
975changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
976Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
977intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
978durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
979the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
980License::
981
982 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
983
984says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
985to Python 2.1.1.
986
987The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
988License Version 2.
989
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000990Core and builtins
991-----------------
992
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000993- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
994 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
995 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
996 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
997 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
998 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
999 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
Andrew M. Kuchlingb2a739d2005-11-22 15:14:44 +00001000 ``AttributeError`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +00001001 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
1002 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
1003
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +00001004- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001005
1006Extension Modules
1007-----------------
1008
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +00001009- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
1010 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
1011 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
1012 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001013
1014Library
1015-------
1016
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +00001017- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
1018 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
1019 returned.
1020
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +00001021- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
1022
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +00001023- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
1024 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
1025
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +00001026- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
1027
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +00001028- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
1029 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001030
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +00001031- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
1032
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +00001033- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
1034
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +00001035- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +00001036 the source code is updated and reloaded.
1037
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001038Build
1039-----
1040
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +00001041- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001042
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001043What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
1044================================
1045
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +00001046*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001047
1048Core and builtins
1049-----------------
1050
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +00001051- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +00001052 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
1053
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +00001054- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
1055 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
1056 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
1057 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
1058
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +00001059- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
1060 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
1061
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +00001062- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
1063 constant.
1064
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +00001065- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
1066 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
1067 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
1068 large), and to anomalies such as
1069 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
1070 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
1071 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
1072 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001073
1074Extension modules
1075-----------------
1076
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +00001077- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
1078 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +00001079 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
1080 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
1081 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001082
1083Library
1084-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +00001085
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +00001086- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +00001087 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +00001088 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
1089 --swig-cpp.
1090
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +00001091- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
1092 it is set.
1093
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +00001094- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +00001095
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +00001096- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
1097 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
1098 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
1099 Closes bug #1039270.
1100
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +00001101- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +00001102
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +00001103 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +00001104 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
1105 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
1106 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
1107 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
1108 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
1109 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
1110 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
1111 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
1112 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
1113 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
1114 + Updates to documentation.
1115
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +00001116- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
1117 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
1118 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
1119 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
1120
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +00001121- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001122
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +00001123- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
1124 applications should use the getmember function.
1125
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +00001126- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
1127
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +00001128- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
1129 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
1130 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
1131 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
1132 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
1133 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
1134 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
1135 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
1136 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
1137
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001138- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
1139 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +00001140 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001141
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +00001142- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
1143 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
1144 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
1145 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
1146 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
1147 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
1148 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
1149 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001150
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +00001151- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
1152 the new public features (of which there are many).
1153
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +00001154- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001155 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
1156 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
1157 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
1158 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +00001159 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001160
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +00001161- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
1162
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +00001163- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
1164 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
1165 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
1166 options.
1167
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +00001168- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
1169 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
1170 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
1171 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
1172 conditions under which non-string values work.
1173
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001174Build
1175-----
1176
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +00001177- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
1178 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
1179 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
1180
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +00001181- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
1182 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
1183 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
1184 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
1185 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001186
1187C API
1188-----
1189
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +00001190- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
1191 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
1192
1193- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
1194
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +00001195- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
1196 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
1197 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
1198 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
1199 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
1200 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
1201 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
1202 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
1203 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
1204
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +00001205- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
1206
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +00001207- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
1208 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
1209 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001210
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001211Tests
1212-----
1213
1214- test__locale ported to unittest
1215
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001216Mac
1217---
1218
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +00001219- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
1220 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
1221 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001222
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001223Tools/Demos
1224-----------
1225
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +00001226- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
1227 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
1228 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
1229 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
1230 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001231
1232
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001233What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
1234=================================
1235
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +00001236*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001237
1238Core and builtins
1239-----------------
1240
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001241- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001242 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
1243
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001244- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
1245 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
1246 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
1247 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
1248 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
1249 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
1250 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
1251 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001252 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
1253 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
1254 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
1255 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
1256 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001257
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +00001258- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
1259 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
1260 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
1261 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
1262 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
1263
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +00001264- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
1265
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +00001266- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
1267 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
1268
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +00001269- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
1270 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
1271 modified the list.
1272
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +00001273- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
1274 functions is now writable.
1275
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +00001276- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
1277 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
1278 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
1279 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
1280
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001281- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
1282 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
1283 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
1284 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
1285 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +00001286
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +00001287- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
1288 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
1289
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001290Extension modules
1291-----------------
1292
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001293- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
1294
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +00001295- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
1296 data.
1297
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001298- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
1299 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
1300 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
1301 supposed to have been truncated away.
1302
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +00001303- Added socket.socketpair().
1304
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +00001305- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
1306 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
1307
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001308- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +00001309 versions of Python, have now been removed.
1310
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001311Library
1312-------
1313
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001314- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001315 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001316
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +00001317- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
1318 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
1319
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +00001320- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
1321 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
1322
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001323- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
1324
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +00001325- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
1326 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +00001327
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +00001328- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
1329 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
1330
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +00001331- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
1332
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +00001333- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
1334
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +00001335- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
1336
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +00001337- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
1338 Percivall.
1339
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +00001340- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
1341 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
1342
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001343- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
1344 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
1345 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001346 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001347
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001348- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
1349 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
1350 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
1351 and exponent.
1352
1353- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
1354
1355- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +00001356 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001357 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
1358
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001359- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
1360 to the readline module.
1361
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001362- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001363 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
1364 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001365
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +00001366- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
1367 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
1368 contains symlinks.
1369
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +00001370- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
1371 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
1372
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +00001373- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
1374 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
1375 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1376
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001377- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
1378 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
1379 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
1380 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
1381 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
1382 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
1383 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
1384 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
1385 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
1386 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
1387 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
1388 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
1389 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
1390
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +00001391- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
1392
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001393Tools/Demos
1394-----------
1395
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001396- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
1397 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
1398
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +00001399- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
1400
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001401Build
1402-----
1403
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001404- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
1405 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
1406 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
1407 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
1408 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
1409 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
1410 plans to do so.
1411
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +00001412- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
1413 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
1414
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +00001415- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
1416 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
1417
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001418- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
1419 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
1420
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +00001421- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
1422 GNU/k*BSD systems.
1423
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +00001424- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
1425 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
1426
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001427C API
1428-----
1429
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001430..
1431
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001432Documentation
1433-------------
1434
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001435- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1436 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1437
1438- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1439 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1440 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001441
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001442New platforms
1443-------------
1444
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001445- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1446
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001447Tests
1448-----
1449
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001450..
1451
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001452Windows
1453-------
1454
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001455- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1456 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1457 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1458 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1459 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1460 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1461 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1462 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1463 the problem.
1464
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001465Mac
1466---
1467
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001468..
1469
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001470
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001471What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1472=================================
1473
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001474*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001475
1476Core and builtins
1477-----------------
1478
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001479- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1480 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1481 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1482 sensitive code.
1483
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001484- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001485 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001486
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001487 @staticmethod
1488 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001489
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001490 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001491
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001492- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1493 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1494 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1495 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1496 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1497 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1498 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1499 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1500 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1501 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1502 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1503
1504 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1505 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1506 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1507 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1508 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1509 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1510 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1511
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001512- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1513 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1514
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001515- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001516 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001517
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001518- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001519 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001520 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1521
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001522- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001523 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1524 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1525
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001526- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1527 types that support garbage collection.
1528
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001529- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1530
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001531- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1532 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1533 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1534 Jython.
1535
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001536- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1537
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001538- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1539 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1540
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001541- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1542 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1543 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001544
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001545- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1546 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1547 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1548
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001549Extension modules
1550-----------------
1551
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001552- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1553
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001554Library
1555-------
1556
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001557- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1558 TIS-620
1559
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001560- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1561 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1562 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1563 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1564 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1565 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1566 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1567 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1568 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1569 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1570
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001571- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1572
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001573- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1574 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1575 same as when the argument is omitted).
1576 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1577
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001578- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1579
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001580- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1581 schemes are offered.
1582
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001583- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1584
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001585- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1586 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1587 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1588
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001589- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1590
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001591- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1592 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1593
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001594- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1595 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1596 when dummy_threading is being used.
1597
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001598- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1599 from a tarfile.
1600
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001601- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001602 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001603
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001604- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1605 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1606 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1607 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1608
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001609- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1610 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1611
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001612- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1613 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1614 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1615 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1616 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1617 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1618 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1619 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1620 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1621 by some other method in progress).
1622
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001623- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1624 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1625 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001626
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001627- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1628
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001629- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1630 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1631 AM Kuchling.
1632
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001633- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1634 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1635 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1636
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001637- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1638 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1639 instead of unsigned.
1640
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001641- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001642 no longer part of the public API.
1643
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001644- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1645 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1646 string methods of the same name).
1647
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001648- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001649 SF patch 945642.
1650
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001651- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1652
1653 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1654
1655 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1656 DocTestSuites.
1657
1658- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1659 that provide thread-local data.
1660
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001661- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1662 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1663
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001664- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1665
1666- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1667 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1668 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1669
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001670- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1671
1672 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1673 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1674 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001675
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001676 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1677 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1678 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1679 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1680
1681 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1682 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1683
1684 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1685 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1686 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1687 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1688
1689 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1690 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1691 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1692 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1693 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1694
1695 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1696 wrapping help output.
1697
1698 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1699 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1700 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001701
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001702C API
1703-----
1704
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001705- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1706 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1707 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1708 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1709 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1710 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1711 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1712 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1713 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1714 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1715 its visible semantics have not changed.
1716
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001717- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1718 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1719
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001720Documentation
1721-------------
1722
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001723- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001724
1725 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001726 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001727
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001728 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001729
1730 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1731
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001732- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001733
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001734Tests
1735-----
1736
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001737- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001738 platforms that use the Makefile.
1739
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001740- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1741 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1742 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1743
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001744
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001745What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1746=================================
1747
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001748*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001749
1750Core and builtins
1751-----------------
1752
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001753- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1754 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1755 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1756 objects now (one object instead of three).
1757
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001758- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1759 Windows DLLs.
1760
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001761- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1762 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001763
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001764- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1765 a new .pyc magic.
1766
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001767- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1768 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1769 be there.
1770
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001771- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1772 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1773 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1774
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001775- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1776 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1777 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1778
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001779- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1780
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001781- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1782 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1783 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001784
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001785- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1786 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1787
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001788- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1789
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001790- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001791 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001792
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001793- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1794
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001795- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1796
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001797- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1798 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1799
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001800- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1801 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1802 Fixes bug #858016 .
1803
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001804- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1805 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1806 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1807
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001808- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1809 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1810 improves their performance (about 35%).
1811
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001812- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1813 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1814 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1815
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001816- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1817 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1818 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1819 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1820
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001821- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1822 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001823 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001824 length is not known).
1825
1826- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1827 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001828 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1829 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001830 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1831
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001832- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1833 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1834
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001835- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1836 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1837 keyword arguments.
1838
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001839- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1840 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1841 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1842
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001843- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1844 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1845 cases.
1846
1847- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1848 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1849 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1850 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1851 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1852 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1853 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1854 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1855 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1856 a release build.
1857
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001858- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1859 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1860
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001861- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001862 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001863
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001864- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1865 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1866 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1867 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1868 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1869 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1870 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1871 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1872 destroyed.
1873
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001874- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1875 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1876 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1877 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1878 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1879 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1880 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1881 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1882
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001883- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1884 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1885 character other than a space.
1886
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001887- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1888 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1889 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1890 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1891 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1892 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1893 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1894 attributes with the same name.
1895
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001896- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1897 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1898 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1899 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1900 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1901 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1902 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1903 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1904 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1905 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1906 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1907 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1908 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1909 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001910
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001911- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1912 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1913 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1914 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1915 This has been repaired.
1916
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001917- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1918
1919- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1920
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001921- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1922 over a sequence.
1923
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001924- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001925 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001926
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001927- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1928
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001929- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1930 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1931 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1932 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1933 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1934 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1935 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1936 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1937
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001938- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1939 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1940 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1941
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001942- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1943 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1944 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1945 freelist.
1946
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001947- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1948 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1949
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001950- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1951 number.
1952
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001953- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1954 a TypeError exception.
1955
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001956- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1957 820195.
1958
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001959- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1960 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1961 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1962
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001963- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001964 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1965 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001966
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001967- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1968 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1969 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1970
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001971- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1972 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001973 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001974
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001975- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001976 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1977 the first call.
1978
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001979
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001980Extension modules
1981-----------------
1982
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001983- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1984 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1985
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001986- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1987 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1988 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1989 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1990 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1991 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1992 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001993
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001994- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1995
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001996- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1997
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001998- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1999 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
2000
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00002001- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
2002 fewer false positives.
2003
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00002004- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
2005 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
2006
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002007- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00002008 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
2009
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00002010- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002011 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00002012 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00002013 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
2014 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00002015
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00002016- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
2017 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
2018 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
2019 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
2020
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00002021- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
2022 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
2023 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
2024 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
2025 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
2026 #897625.
2027
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00002028- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
2029 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
2030
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00002031- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
2032 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
2033 and pops on either side of the deque.
2034
2035- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
2036 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
2037
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00002038- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
2039 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
2040 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
2041 other functions that expect a function argument.
2042
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00002043- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
2044
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00002045- os.getsid was added.
2046
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00002047- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
2048 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
2049 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
2050
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00002051- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
2052
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00002053- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
2054
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00002055- readline.clear_history was added.
2056
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00002057- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
2058
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00002059- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
2060
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00002061- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
2062
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00002063- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
2064
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00002065- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
2066
2067- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
2068
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00002069- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
2070
2071- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
2072
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00002073- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
2074 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
2075 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
2076
2077- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
2078 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
2079 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
2080 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
2081 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
2082 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
2083 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
2084
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00002085- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
2086 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
2087 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
2088 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00002089
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002090- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00002091 iterators from a single iterable.
2092
2093- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
2094 of raising a TypeError exception.
2095
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00002096- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
2097 as parameter.
2098
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002099Library
2100-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00002101
Armin Rigoa871ef22006-02-08 12:53:56 +00002102- Added a new module: cProfile, a C profiler with the same interface as the
2103 profile module. cProfile avoids some of the drawbacks of the hotshot
2104 profiler and provides a bit more information than the other two profilers.
2105 Based on "lsprof" (patch #1212837).
2106
Georg Brandlf0de6a12005-08-22 18:02:59 +00002107- Bug #1266283: The new function "lexists" is now in os.path.__all__.
2108
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00002109- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
2110 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
2111 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002112
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00002113- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
2114 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
2115 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00002116
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00002117- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00002118
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00002119- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
2120 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00002121
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00002122- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
2123 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
2124
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00002125- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
2126
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00002127- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00002128 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00002129
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002130- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00002131 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002132
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00002133- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
2134
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00002135- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
2136 on cygwin and mingw32.
2137
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00002138- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
2139
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00002140- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
2141 module.
2142
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00002143- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
2144 installation scheme for all platforms.
2145
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00002146- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00002147 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00002148
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00002149- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
2150 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
2151 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
2152
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00002153- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
2154 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
2155 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
2156
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00002157- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
2158
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00002159- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
2160
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00002161- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
2162 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
2163
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00002164- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
2165 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
2166 type pattern with the same value exists.
2167
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00002168- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
2169 when run from the command prompt).
2170
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00002171- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
2172 not taken into consideration when caching value.
2173
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00002174- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
2175 default sort).
2176
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00002177- Added global runctx function to profile module
2178
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00002179- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
2180
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00002181- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
2182
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00002183- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
2184
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002185- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00002186 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
2187 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
2188 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
2189 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
2190 accordingly.
2191
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00002192- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
2193 decoding standards.
2194
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00002195- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
2196 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
2197 called for all requests.
2198
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00002199- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
2200 they are passed to the compiler.
2201
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00002202- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
2203 indent, width and depth.
2204
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00002205- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
2206 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
2207
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00002208- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
2209 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
2210
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00002211- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
2212
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00002213- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
2214
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00002215- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
2216
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00002217- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
2218 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
2219
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00002220- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00002221 for better performance.
2222
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002223- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00002224
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00002225- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
2226 a string).
2227
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00002228- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
2229
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00002230- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
2231
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00002232- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
2233
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00002234- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
2235
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00002236- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
2237 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
2238 list of fieldnames.
2239
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00002240- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
2241 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
2242
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00002243- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
2244
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00002245- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
2246 empty lists.
2247
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00002248- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
2249 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
2250 and shelves.
2251
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00002252- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
2253 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
2254
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002255- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00002256 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
2257 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002258
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00002259- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
2260 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00002261 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00002262
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002263- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00002264 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
2265 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
2266
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002267- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
2268 and removed in Py2.4.
2269
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00002270- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
2271
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00002272- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
2273
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002274Tools/Demos
2275-----------
2276
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00002277- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
2278 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
2279
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00002280- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
2281
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00002282- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
2283 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
2284 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
2285 destination in situations where both files are given.
2286
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00002287- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
2288 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
2289 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
2290 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
2291
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00002292- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
2293
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00002294- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
2295 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
2296 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
2297 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
2298 now.
2299
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002300- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
2301 in effect
2302
2303- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
2304 C-c C-h
2305
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00002306- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
2307 -d option was given.
2308
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002309Build
2310-----
2311
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00002312- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
2313 build under OS X.
2314
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00002315- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
2316 --enable-profiling.
2317
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00002318- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
2319 is configured --with-tsc.
2320
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00002321- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
2322 on AMD64.
2323
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00002324- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
2325 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
2326
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00002327- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
2328 removed.
2329
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00002330- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
2331 supported (see PEP 11).
2332
2333- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
2334
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00002335- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
2336
2337- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
2338 (see PEP 11).
2339
2340- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
2341 sizeof(char) must be 1.
2342
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002343C API
2344-----
2345
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00002346- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
2347 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
2348 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
2349
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00002350- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
2351 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
2352 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
2353 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
2354
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00002355- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
2356 generator objects.
2357
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002358- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
2359 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00002360 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
2361 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002362
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00002363- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
2364 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
2365
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00002366- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
2367 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
2368 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
2369 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
2370 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
2371
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00002372- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
2373 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
2374 about 10% faster.
2375
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00002376- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
2377 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
2378
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00002379- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
2380 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
2381 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
2382 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
2383
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002384Windows
2385-------
2386
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00002387- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
2388 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
2389 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
2390 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
2391
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00002392- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
2393 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
2394 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
2395
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002396
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002397What's New in Python 2.3 final?
2398===============================
2399
2400*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
2401
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002402IDLE
2403----
2404
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00002405- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
2406 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
2407 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
2408 context-menu actions.
2409
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002410- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
2411 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
2412 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
2413 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
2414 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
2415 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
2416 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
2417 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
2418 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
2419
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002420
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002421What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
2422=============================================
2423
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00002424*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002425
2426Core and builtins
2427-----------------
2428
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002429- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002430 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002431 comment at the end are still unsupported.
2432
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002433Extension modules
2434-----------------
2435
2436- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
2437 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
2438 than once. This has been fixed.
2439
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002440- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2441 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2442 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2443 call.
2444
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002445- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2446
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002447Library
2448-------
2449
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002450- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2451 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2452
2453- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2454 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2455 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2456 restored.
2457
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002458IDLE
2459----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002460
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002461- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002462
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002463Build
2464-----
2465
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002466- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2467 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2468
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002469C API
2470-----
2471
2472Windows
2473-------
2474
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002475- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2476 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2477
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002478- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2479
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002480Mac
2481---
2482
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002483- Various fixes to pimp.
2484
2485- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2486
2487- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2488 more problems than it solves.
2489
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002490
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002491What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2492=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002493
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002494*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2495
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002496Core and builtins
2497-----------------
2498
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002499- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2500 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2501
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002502- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2503 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002504 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002505
2506- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2507 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2508 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002509 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002510
2511- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2512 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002513
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002514- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2515 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2516 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2517
2518- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002519 770247.
2520
2521- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002522
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002523Extension modules
2524-----------------
2525
2526- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2527 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2528
2529- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2530
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002531- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2532
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002533- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2534 contained within the _strptime module.
2535
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002536- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2537 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2538
2539- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002540 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2541
2542- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2543 the find_class attribute, if present.
2544
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002545- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002546
2547 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2548 (SF bug 763298).
2549
2550 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002551 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2552 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2553 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002554
2555 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2556
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002557Library
2558-------
2559
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002560- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2561
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002562- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2563 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2564 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2565 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2566 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2567 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2568 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2569 or Tester().
2570
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002571- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2572 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2573 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2574 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2575 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2576 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2577 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2578 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2579 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002580
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002581 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002582
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002583- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2584 weren't before was an oversight.
2585
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002586- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2587 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2588
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002589- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2590 when there are no lines.
2591
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002592- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2593 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2594
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002595- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2596 to child processes.
2597
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002598- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2599
2600- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2601
2602- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2603 xmlrpclib.
2604
2605- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2606 responses.
2607
2608- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2609 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2610
2611- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2612 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2613 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2614
2615- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2616 used as patterns.
2617
2618- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2619 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2620 than Tk 8.3.
2621
2622- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2623
2624- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002625
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002626Tools/Demos
2627-----------
2628
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002629- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2630
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002631- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2632
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002633- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002634
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002635Build
2636-----
2637
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002638- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2639
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002640- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2641
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002642- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2643 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002644
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002645- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2646 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2647 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002648
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002649C API
2650-----
2651
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002652- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2653 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2654
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002655Windows
2656-------
2657
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002658- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2659 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2660 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2661 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2662 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2663 Python exception ::
2664
2665 thread.error: can't start new thread
2666
2667 is raised now.
2668
2669- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2670 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2671 instead of from DLL teardown.
2672
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002673Mac
2674---
2675
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002676- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002677 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002678 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2679 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2680 the executable in the bundle.
2681
2682- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002683
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002684- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2685
2686- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2687 on Panther.
2688
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002689What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2690================================
2691
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002692*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002693
2694Core and builtins
2695-----------------
2696
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002697- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2698 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2699 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2700 with the -i option.
2701
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002702- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2703 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2704
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002705- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2706 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2707
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002708- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2709 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2710 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2711 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2712 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2713 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2714 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2715 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2716 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2717 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2718 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2719 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2720 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002721
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002722- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2723 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2724 embedded in a lambda expression.
2725
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002726- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2727 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2728 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2729 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2730 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2731
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002732- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2733 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2734 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2735
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002736- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2737 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2738
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002739- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2740 It's writable again.
2741
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002742- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2743 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2744 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002745 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002746
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002747- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2748 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2749 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2750
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002751Extension modules
2752-----------------
2753
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002754- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2755 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2756
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002757- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2758 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2759 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2760 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2761
2762- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2763 collection.
2764
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002765- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2766 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2767 unique within a single program run.
2768
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002769- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2770 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2771
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002772- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2773 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2774
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002775- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2776 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002777
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002778- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2779
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002780- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2781 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2782
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002783- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2784 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2785 for many BSD-derived systems.
2786
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002787
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002788Library
2789-------
2790
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002791- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2792 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2793 primary ones:
2794
2795 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2796 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2797 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2798
2799 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2800 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2801 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2802 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2803 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2804 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2805
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002806- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2807 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2808 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2809 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2810 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2811 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2812 argument.
2813
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002814- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2815 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2816 in the archive.
2817
2818- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2819 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2820
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002821- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2822 569574).
2823
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002824- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2825 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2826 no more.
2827
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002828- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2829 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2830 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2831 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2832 code coverage.
2833
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002834- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2835 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2836 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002837 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2838 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002839
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002840- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2841 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2842 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002843 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002844
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002845- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2846
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002847- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2848 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2849 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2850 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2851
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002852- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2853 handling.
2854
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002855- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2856 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2857
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002858- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2859 in socket.py.
2860
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002861- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2862
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002863- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2864 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2865 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2866 opener with proxy support.
2867
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002868- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2869
2870- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2871
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002872Tools/Demos
2873-----------
2874
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002875- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2876
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002877- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2878
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002879- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2880 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002881
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002882- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2883 files.
2884
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002885Build
2886-----
2887
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002888- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002889 different root directory.
2890
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002891C API
2892-----
2893
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002894- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2895 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2896 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2897 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2898 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2899 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2900 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2901 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2902 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2903 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2904
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002905- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2906 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2907 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2908 from Python.
2909
2910
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002911New platforms
2912-------------
2913
2914None this time.
2915
2916Tests
2917-----
2918
2919- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2920 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2921
2922Windows
2923-------
2924
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002925- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2926
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002927- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2928 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2929 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2930 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2931 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2932 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2933 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2934 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2935 that's what it's for.
2936
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002937Mac
2938---
2939
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002940- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2941 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2942 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2943 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002944- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2945 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2946- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002947
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002948SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2949------------------------------------
2950
2951430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2952598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2953622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2954661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2955683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2956697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2957713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2958724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2959727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2960729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2961730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2962731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2963732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2964733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2965735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2966740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2967744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2968745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2969747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2970749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2971751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2972753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2973755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2974757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2975760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2976
2977
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002978What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2979================================
2980
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002981*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002982
2983Core and builtins
2984-----------------
2985
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002986- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2987 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2988
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002989- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2990 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2991 and cannot be strings).
2992
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002993- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2994 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2995 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2996 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2997
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002998- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2999 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
3000 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
3001 Python itself.
3002
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00003003- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
3004 the referenced object, if it has one.
3005
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00003006- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
3007 the thread started at
3008 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
3009
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00003010- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
3011 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
3012 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
3013 placed on a list index.
3014
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00003015- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
3016 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
3017 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
3018 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
3019
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003020- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
3021 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
3022 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
3023 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
3024 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
3025 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
3026 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
3027
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00003028- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
3029 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
3030 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
3031 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
3032 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
3033
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00003034- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
3035 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00003036
3037- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
3038 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
3039 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
3040 #693195.)
3041
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00003042- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
3043 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003044
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00003045- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00003046 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00003047 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
3048 interpreter executions, would fail.
3049
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00003050- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00003051 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00003052 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00003053
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003054Extension modules
3055-----------------
3056
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00003057- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
3058 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
3059 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
3060 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
3061
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00003062- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
3063 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
3064
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00003065- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
3066 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
3067 and Greg Chapman.)
3068
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00003069- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
3070 recursively.
3071
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00003072- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00003073 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
3074 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
3075 leaks.
3076
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00003077- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
3078
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00003079- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
3080 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
3081 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
3082 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
3083 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
3084 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
3085 #705836.
3086
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00003087- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00003088 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
3089
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00003090- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
3091 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
3092 See SF bug #692416.
3093
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00003094- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
3095 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
3096
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00003097- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
3098 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
3099 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003100
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00003101- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00003102 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
3103 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
3104
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00003105- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
3106 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
3107 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
3108 timeouts to work properly.
3109
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003110Library
3111-------
3112
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00003113- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
3114 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
3115 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
3116 future release.
3117
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00003118- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
3119 for querying platform dependent features.
3120
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00003121- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00003122
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00003123- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
3124 pickle protocol versions.
3125
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00003126- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
3127 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
3128 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
3129
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00003130- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
3131
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00003132- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
3133 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
3134 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
3135 modules.
3136
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00003137- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
3138 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
3139 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
3140
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00003141- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
3142 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
3143
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00003144- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
3145 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
3146 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
3147
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003148- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00003149 MS Office extensions.
3150
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00003151- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
3152 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
3153
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00003154- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
3155 execution speed of expressions and statements.
3156
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003157- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
3158 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
3159 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
3160 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
3161 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
3162 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
3163
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00003164- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
3165 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
3166 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003167
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00003168- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
3169 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
3170 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
3171
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00003172- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
3173
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00003174- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
3175 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
3176 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
3177
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003178Tools/Demos
3179-----------
3180
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00003181- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
3182 See the module docstring for details.
3183
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003184Build
3185-----
3186
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00003187- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
3188 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003189
3190C API
3191-----
3192
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003193- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
3194
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00003195- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
3196 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
3197 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
3198
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003199- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
3200 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00003201
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003202 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
3203 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
3204 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00003205
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00003206- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00003207 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
3208
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00003209- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
3210 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
3211 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003212
3213New platforms
3214-------------
3215
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00003216None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003217
3218Tests
3219-----
3220
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00003221- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
3222 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003223
3224Windows
3225-------
3226
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00003227- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
3228 function.
3229
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00003230- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
3231 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003232
3233Mac
3234---
3235
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00003236- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
3237 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00003238
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00003239- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
3240 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003241
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00003242- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
3243 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
3244 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003245
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003246- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00003247 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
3248 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003249
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003250- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
3251 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003252
3253
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003254What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
3255=================================
3256
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003257*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003258
3259Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003260-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003261
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00003262- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
3263 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
3264 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
3265
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00003266- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
3267 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
3268 (SF patch #664376.)
3269
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003270- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
3271 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
3272 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
3273 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
3274 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
3275 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00003276 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003277
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003278- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
3279 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
3280 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
3281 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003282 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003283
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00003284- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
3285 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
3286 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
3287 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
3288 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
3289 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
3290 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
3291 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
3292 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
3293 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
3294 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
3295
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00003296- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
3297 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
3298 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
3299 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
3300 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
3301 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
3302
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00003303- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
3304 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
3305
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00003306- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
3307 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
3308 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
3309 case.)
3310
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00003311- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
3312 passed as unicode strings.
3313
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00003314- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
3315 See SF bug #683467.
3316
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00003317- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
3318 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
3319
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00003320- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
3321
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00003322- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
3323
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00003324- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
3325 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
3326 arguments.
3327
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00003328- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
3329 See SF bug #667147.
3330
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003331- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003332 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003333 See SF bug #676155.
3334
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003335- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003336 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003337 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
3338 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
3339 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
3340 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
3341 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
3342 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003343
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003344Extension modules
3345-----------------
3346
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003347- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
3348 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3349 tp_as_number pointer.
3350
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003351- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
3352 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
3353 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
3354 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
3355 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
3356
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003357- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
3358
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00003359- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
3360
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003361- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00003362 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003363 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
3364 patch #678531.)
3365
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00003366- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
3367 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
3368
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00003369- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
3370 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
3371
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00003372- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
3373
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00003374- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
3375 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
3376 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
3377
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003378- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
3379
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003380- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
3381 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
3382
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003383- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003384
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003385- datetime changes:
3386
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00003387 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
3388
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003389 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
3390 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
3391 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
3392 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
3393 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
3394 now.
3395
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003396 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003397 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
3398 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003399
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003400 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003401 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003402 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
3403 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
3404 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
3405 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003406
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003407 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
3408 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
3409 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003410 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
3411
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003412 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
3413 by a later example coded by Guido.
3414
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003415 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003416 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
3417 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
3418 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003419 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
3420 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
3421
3422 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
3423 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
3424 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
3425 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
3426 tzinfo subclass instance.
3427
3428 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
3429 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
3430 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
3431 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
3432 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
3433 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
3434 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
3435 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003436
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003437 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
3438 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3439 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3440 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3441 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003442 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3443
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003444 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003445
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003446 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3447 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3448 as a naive datetime object.
3449
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003450 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3451 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3452 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3453
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003454 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3455 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3456 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3457 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3458 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3459 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3460 comparison.
3461
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003462 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3463 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3464 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3465 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003466 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003467
3468 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003469
3470 and ::
3471
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003472 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3473
3474 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3475 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3476 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3477 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3478
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003479 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3480 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3481 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3482 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3483 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3484
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003485 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3486 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003487 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3488 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003489
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003490Library
3491-------
3492
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003493- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3494 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3495
3496- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3497 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3498 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3499 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3500 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3501 See PEP 307 for details.
3502
3503- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3504 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3505
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003506- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3507 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003508 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003509 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3510 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003511 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003512
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003513- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3514 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3515
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003516- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3517 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3518 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3519
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003520- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3521
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003522- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3523 exception.
3524
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003525- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3526 class.
3527
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003528- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3529 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3530 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3531
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003532- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3533 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3534
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003535- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003536 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3537 See SF bug #659228.
3538
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003539- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3540 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3541 See SF patch #651082.
3542
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003543- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003544
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003545- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3546 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3547
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003548- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003549 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003550
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003551- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3552 DOS paths from other platforms.
3553
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003554Tools/Demos
3555-----------
3556
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003557- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3558 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3559 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3560 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3561 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3562 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3563 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3564 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3565 example:
3566
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003567 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3568 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003569
3570 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3571
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003572
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003573Build
3574-----
3575
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003576- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3577 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3578 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003579 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3580
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003581 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3582
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003583- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3584 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3585 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3586 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3587 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3588 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3589 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3590 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3591 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3592
3593- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3594 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3595 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3596 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3597
3598- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3599 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3600
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003601C API
3602-----
3603
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003604- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3605 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003606
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003607- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3608 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3609 tp_as_number pointer.
3610
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003611- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3612 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3613 (SF #681367)
3614
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003615- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3616 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3617 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3618 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003619
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003620Tests
3621-----
3622
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003623- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003624 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3625 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3626 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3627 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3628 pydoc.)
3629
3630- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3631
3632- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003633
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003634Windows
3635-------
3636
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003637- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3638 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3639 time).
3640
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003641- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3642 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3643
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003644- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3645 release without strong cryptography.
3646
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003647- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003648 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003649
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003650- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3651 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3652
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003653Mac
3654---
3655
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003656- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3657 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003658
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003659- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3660 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3661 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003662
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003663- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3664 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003665
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003666- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3667 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3668 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3669 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003670
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003671- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003672 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3673 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3674 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003675
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003676
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003677What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003678=================================
3679
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003680*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003681
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003682Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003683--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003684
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003685- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3686
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003687- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3688 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003689 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003690 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003691 a different meaning than before.
3692
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003693- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003694 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003695 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003696
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003697- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003698 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003699 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003700
3701- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3702 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3703 and deallocation.
3704
3705- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3706 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3707
3708- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3709 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3710 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3711 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3712 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3713
3714- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3715 now detected by the garbage collector.
3716
3717- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3718 [SF bug 519621]
3719
3720- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3721 identifier.
3722
3723- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3724 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3725 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3726 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3727 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3728 [SF bug 563060]
3729
3730- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3731 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3732 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3733 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3734 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3735
3736- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3737 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3738 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3739
3740- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3741
3742- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3743 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3744 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3745 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3746 state of the slots would be lost.)
3747
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003748Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003749-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003750
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003751- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003752 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3753 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3754 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3755 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003756 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3757 Jython 2.1.
3758
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003759- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003760 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003761 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3762 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3763 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3764 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3765 these, see PEP 302.
3766
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003767- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3768 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3769 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3770
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003771- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3772 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3773 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3774
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003775- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3776 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3777 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3778
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003779- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3780 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3781 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3782 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3783 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3784 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3785 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3786 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3787 releases or implementations.
3788
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003789- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003790 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3791 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003792
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003793- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3794 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3795
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003796- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3797 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3798 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3799
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003800- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3801 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3802
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003803- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3804 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003805 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3806 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003807
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003808- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3809 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3810 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3811 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3812 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3813
3814 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3815 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3816 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3817 pattern.
3818
3819 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3820 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3821 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3822 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3823
3824 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3825 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3826 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3827 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3828 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3829 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3830
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003831- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3832 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3833 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3834 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3835 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3836 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3837 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3838 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003839
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003840- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3841 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3842 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3843 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3844 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003845 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3846 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3847 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3848 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3849 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3850 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3851 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003852
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003853- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3854 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3855
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003856- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3857 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3858 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3859 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3860 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3861 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3862 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3863 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3864 to Zack Weinberg!
3865
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003866- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3867 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3868 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3869 type. This has been fixed now.
3870
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003871- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3872 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3873 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3874
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003875- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3876 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3877 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3878 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3879 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3880 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3881 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3882 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003883 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003884
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003885- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3886 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3887 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003888
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003889- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3890 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3891 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3892 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3893 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3894 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3895 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3896 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003897 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003898 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3899 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3900
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003901- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3902 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3903 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3904 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3905 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3906 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3907 this.)
3908
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003909- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3910 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003911 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003912 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003913 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3914 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003915 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3916 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003917
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003918- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3919 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3920 currently running.
3921
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003922- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3923 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3924 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3925 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3926
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003927- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3928 as directory names.
3929
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003930- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3931 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3932
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003933- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3934 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3935
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003936- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003937 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3938 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003939
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003940- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3941 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3942 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3943 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3944 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3945
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003946- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3947 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3948 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3949 removed.
3950
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003951- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3952 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3953 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3954
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003955- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3956 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3957 to __debug__.
3958
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003959- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3960 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3961 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3962
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003963- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3964 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3965 deprecated now.
3966
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003967- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3968 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3969 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003970
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003971- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3972 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3973 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3974 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3975 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003976
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003977- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3978 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3979
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003980- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3981 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3982 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003983 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003984 is backward compatible.
3985
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003986- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3987 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3988 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3989 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3990 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3991
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003992- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3993 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3994 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3995 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3996 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3997 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003998
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003999- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
4000 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
4001
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004002- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
4003 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
4004
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004005- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
4006 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
4007 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
4008 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
4009 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
4010
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00004011- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
4012 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
4013 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
4014
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004015- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00004016 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
4017
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00004018- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
4019 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
4020 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00004021
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00004022- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
4023 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
4024
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00004025- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
4026 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
4027 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
4028
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00004029- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
4030
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004031Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004032-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004033
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00004034- Added three operators to the operator module:
4035 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
4036 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
4037 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
4038
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00004039- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
4040
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00004041- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
4042 archives.
4043
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004044- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
4045 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
4046 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
4047
4048 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
4049
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00004050- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
4051 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
4052 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00004053 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00004054
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00004055- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
4056 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
4057 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
4058 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00004059 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
4060 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
4061 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
4062 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00004063
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00004064- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
4065 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00004066
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00004067- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
4068
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00004069- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
4070 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
4071
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00004072- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
4073 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
4074 supported.
4075
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00004076- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
4077
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00004078- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
4079 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00004080
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00004081- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
4082 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
4083
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00004084- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
4085
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00004086- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
4087 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
4088
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00004089- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
4090 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
4091 functions but callable type objects.
4092
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004093- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00004094 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004095 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00004096
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00004097- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
4098 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00004099
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00004100- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
4101 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00004102
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00004103- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
4104 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
4105 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
4106 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
4107
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00004108- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
4109 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00004110
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00004111- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
4112 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
4113 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
4114 and __imul__.
4115
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00004116- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00004117 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
4118 is called.
4119
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00004120- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
4121 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
4122 interpreter was compiled.
4123
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00004124- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
4125 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
4126 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004127 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00004128 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
4129 1, not 2.
4130
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00004131- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
4132 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
4133 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
4134 limit.
4135
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00004136- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
4137 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
4138 bug #623464.
4139
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00004140- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
4141 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
4142 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
4143 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
4144
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004145Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004146-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004147
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00004148- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
4149
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00004150- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
4151 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
4152 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
4153 with Python 2.3a2.
4154
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00004155- os.path exposes getctime.
4156
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004157- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004158 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004159 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004160 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004161 unit tests of floating point results.
4162
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00004163- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
4164 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
4165 has been increased.
4166
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00004167- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
4168 executed.
4169
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00004170- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
4171 postinstallation script.
4172
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00004173- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
4174 test the current module.
4175
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004176- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00004177 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
4178 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
4179 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
4180 this behavior needs to be controlled.
4181
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00004182- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00004183 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00004184 Ward's Optik package.
4185
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00004186- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
4187 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
4188 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
4189 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
4190
4191- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
4192 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00004193 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00004194
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00004195- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
4196 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
4197 shelf are binary pickles.
4198
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00004199- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
4200 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
4201
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00004202- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
4203 modules are iterators now.
4204
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00004205- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
4206 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
4207 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
4208 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
4209 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
4210 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004211
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00004212- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
4213 with their entity value.
4214
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00004215- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
4216
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004217- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
4218 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00004219
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004220- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
4221 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004222 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00004223
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00004224- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
4225 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
4226 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
4227 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
4228 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
4229 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
4230 main():
4231
4232 import locale
4233 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
4234
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00004235- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
4236 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
4237
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00004238- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
4239 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
4240 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
4241 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
4242 to the new standard.
4243
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00004244- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
4245 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
4246 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
4247 an extension to the database.
4248
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004249- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
4250 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
4251 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
4252 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00004253 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004254
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004255- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00004256 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004257
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00004258- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
4259 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
4260 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
4261 bounded integers.
4262
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00004263- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
4264 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
4265 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
4266 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
4267 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
4268 in existence.
4269
4270 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
4271 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
4272 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
4273 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
4274 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
4275 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
4276
4277 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
4278 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
4279 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
4280 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
4281
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00004282- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
4283 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
4284 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
4285
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00004286- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
4287
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004288- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
4289 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
4290 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
4291 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
4292
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00004293- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
4294 argument.
4295
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00004296- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
4297 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
4298 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
4299 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
4300 [SF patch 560794].
4301
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004302- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
4303 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
4304 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00004305 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
4306 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
4307 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004308
4309- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
4310 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00004311
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00004312- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
4313 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
4314 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
4315 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00004316
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00004317- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
4318 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
4319 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
4320 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
4321 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
4322
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004323- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00004324
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00004325- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
4326
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00004327- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
4328 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
4329 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
4330 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
4331 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
4332 identical to None.
4333
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00004334- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
4335 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
4336 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
4337 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
4338 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
4339 results now.
4340
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00004341- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
4342 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
4343
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004344- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
4345 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
4346 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
4347 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
4348 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
4349 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
4350 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
4351 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
4352
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00004353- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
4354
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00004355- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
4356 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
4357
4358- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
4359 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
4360 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
4361 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
4362 and other systems.
4363
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004364- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
4365 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
4366 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
4367 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 +00004368 work well with these.
4369
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00004370- compileall now supports quiet operation.
4371
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004372- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00004373 connections.
4374
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00004375- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
4376 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
4377 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
4378
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00004379- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
4380 sets
4381
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00004382- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
4383 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
4384 name.
4385
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00004386- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
4387 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
4388 passed in.
4389
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004390- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00004391 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00004392 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
4393 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00004394
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00004395- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
4396
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00004397- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
4398
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00004399- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
4400 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
4401 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
4402
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004403- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
4404 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
4405 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
4406 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00004407 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004408
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004409- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004410 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004411 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004412
4413- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
4414 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
4415 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
4416
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004417- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00004418 the value of its expression argument.
4419
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004420- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
4421 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
4422 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
4423
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00004424- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
4425 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
4426 skipstone browser was included.
4427
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00004428- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
4429 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
4430
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004431Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004432-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004433
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00004434- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
4435 names in addition to accepting file names.
4436
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00004437- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
4438 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4439 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4440 still used and useful.)
4441
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004442- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4443 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4444 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4445 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004446
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004447- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4448 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4449 the generated binary.
4450
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004451Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004452-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004453
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004454- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4455
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004456- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4457 except in the hands of experts.
4458
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004459- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004460 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4461 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4462 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004463
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004464- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4465 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4466 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4467 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4468 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4469 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4470 builds.
4471
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004472- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4473 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4474 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4475 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4476 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4477 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4478 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4479 new type.
4480
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004481- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004482
4483 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4484 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4485 positive infinities.
4486
4487 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4488 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4489 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4490 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4491 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4492 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4493 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4494
4495 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4496
4497 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4498
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004499- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4500 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4501 size of the executable.
4502
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004503- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4504 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4505 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4506 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004507
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004508- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4509
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004510- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4511 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4512 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004513
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004514- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4515 well as Unix.
4516
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004517- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4518 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4519 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4520 modules in the README file for details.
4521
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004522C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004523-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004524
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004525- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4526 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004527 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004528 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004529 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004530
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004531- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4532 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4533 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4534 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4535 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4536 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004537 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004538 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4539 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4540 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4541 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4542 aligned.)
4543
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004544- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4545 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4546 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4547
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004548- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4549 level.
4550
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004551- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4552 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4553 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4554 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4555 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4556
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004557- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4558 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4559 code.
4560
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004561- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4562 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4563 adjusting for negative indices.
4564
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004565- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4566 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4567 object.
4568
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004569- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4570 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4571 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4572
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004573- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4574 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004575
4576- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4577
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004578- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4579 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4580 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4581 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4582
4583- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4584
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004585- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004586
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004587- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004588 without going through the buffer API.
4589
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004590- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004591
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004592- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4593 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4594 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4595 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4596
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004597- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4598 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4599
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004600- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004601 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4602
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004603New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004604-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004605
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004606- OpenVMS is now supported.
4607
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004608- AtheOS is now supported.
4609
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004610- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4611
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004612- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4613
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004614Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004615-----
4616
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004617- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4618 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4619 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004620
4621Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004622-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004623
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004624- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4625 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4626 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4627 bugs.
4628 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004629 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004630 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4631 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004632 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004633
4634- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004635 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004636
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004637- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4638 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4639
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004640- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4641 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004642 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004643 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4644
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004645- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4646 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4647 use files" uninstall option).
4648
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004649- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4650
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004651- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4652 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4653
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004654- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4655 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4656 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4657
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004658- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4659 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4660 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4661 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4662 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004663 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4664 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4665 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004666
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004667- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004668 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004669 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4670 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4671 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4672 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4673 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4674 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4675 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4676 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4677 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4678 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4679 work around.
4680
4681- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4682 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4683 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4684 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4685 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4686 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4687 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4688 specified with O_CREAT too).
4689
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004690Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004691----
4692
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004693- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004694
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004695- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4696 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4697 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4698
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004699- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4700 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4701 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4702
4703- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4704 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4705 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4706 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4707 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4708 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4709 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4710 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004711
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004712- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4713 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4714 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004715
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004716- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4717 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4718 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4719 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4720 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004721
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004722- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4723 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4724 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004725
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004726- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4727 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004728
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004729- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4730 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4731 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4732 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4733 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004734
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004735- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4736 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4737 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4738
4739- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4740 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4741 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004742
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004743- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4744 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4745 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4746 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004747 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004748
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004749- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4750 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004751
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004752- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4753 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004754
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004755- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004756 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004757 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4758 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004759
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004760
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004761What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004762===============================
4763
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004764*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4765
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004766Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004767--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004768
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004769- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4770 with a custom metaclass.
4771
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004772Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004773-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004774
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004775- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4776 are proxies.
4777
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004778Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004779-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004780
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004781- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4782 very short strings.
4783
4784- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4785 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4786 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4787 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4788 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4789
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004790Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004791-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004792
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004793- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4794 close or delete time).
4795
4796- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4797 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4798
4799- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4800
4801- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004802 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004803
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004804Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004805-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004806
4807Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004808-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004809
4810C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004811-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004812
4813New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004814-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004815
4816Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004817-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004818
4819Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004820-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004821
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004822- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4823
4824- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4825 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4826
4827- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4828 deleted at process exit time.
4829
4830- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4831 in backslash.
4832
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004833Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004834----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004835
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004836- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4837 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4838 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4839
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004840
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004841What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004842===========================
4843
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004844*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4845
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004846Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004847--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004848
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004849- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4850 been extensively updated. See
4851
4852 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4853
4854 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4855
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004856- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4857 deleted!
4858
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004859- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4860 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4861 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4862 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4863 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4864
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004865- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4866
4867 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4868 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4869
4870 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4871 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4872 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4873 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4874 supported anyway.
4875
4876 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4877 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4878
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004879- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4880 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4881 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4882 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4883 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004884
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004885- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4886 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4887 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4888
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004889Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004890-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004891
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004892- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4893 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4894 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4895 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4896 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4897 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004898 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4899 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4900 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4901 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004902
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004903- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4904 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4905 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4906
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004907Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004908-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004909
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004910- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4911
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004912Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004913-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004914
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004915- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4916 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4917 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4918 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4919 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4920 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4921
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004922- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4923
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004924- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4925
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004926- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4927
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004928- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4929 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4930 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4931
4932- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4933
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004934Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004935-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004936
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004937- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4938 off a search on Google.
4939
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004940Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004941-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004942
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004943- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4944 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4945 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4946 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4947 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4948 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4949 other platforms should do likewise.
4950
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004951- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4952 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4953 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4954
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004955C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004956-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004957
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004958- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4959 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4960 producing key-value pairs.
4961
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004962- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004963 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004964 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4965 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4966 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4967 previously went unchallenged.
4968
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004969New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004970-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004971
4972Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004973-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004974
4975Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004976-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004977
4978Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004979----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004980
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004981- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4982 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004983
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004984- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4985 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4986 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4987 home.
4988
4989
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004990What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004991===========================
4992
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004993*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4994
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004995Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004996--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004997
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004998- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4999 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00005000
5001 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00005002 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00005003
5004 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
5005 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005006 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00005007 This needs to be documented.
5008
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00005009- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
5010 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
5011
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00005012- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
5013 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
5014 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
5015
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00005016- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
5017 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
5018
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00005019- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
5020 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
5021 class forbids it).
5022
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00005023- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
5024 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
5025 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
5026
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00005027- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
5028
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005029Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005030-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005031
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00005032- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
5033 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005034 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00005035
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00005036- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
5037 (like 1 + '').
5038
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005039Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005040-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005041
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00005042- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
5043 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
5044 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
5045 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005046 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00005047 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
5048
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00005049- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
5050 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
5051 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
5052 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
5053
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00005054- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
5055 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00005056 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
5057 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
5058 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00005059
5060- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
5061 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00005062
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00005063- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
5064 bytes on its input.
5065
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005066Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005067-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005068
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00005069- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00005070 convenience function.
5071
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00005072- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
5073 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
5074 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005075 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
5076 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
5077 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
5078 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
5079 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
5080 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00005081
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00005082- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
5083 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
5084 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
5085 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
5086
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00005087- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
5088 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
5089 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
5090
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00005091- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
5092 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
5093 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
5094 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
5095
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005096- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
5097 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005098 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005099 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
5100 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
5101 new -l and -e options.
5102
5103- statcache is now deprecated.
5104
5105- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
5106 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005107 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005108 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
5109 time properly taken into account.
5110
5111- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
5112 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
5113 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
5114 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
5115
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005116Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005117-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005118
5119Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005120-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005121
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005122- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
5123 is built with libdb3 if available.
5124
5125- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
5126
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005127C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005128-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005129
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00005130- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
5131 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
5132 PySequence_Size().
5133
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005134- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
5135
5136- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
5137 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
5138 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
5139
5140- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
5141 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
5142
5143- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
5144 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
5145
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005146New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005147-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005148
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00005149- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
5150 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
5151
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00005152- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
5153 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
5154
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00005155- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
5156
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005157Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005158-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005159
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00005160- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
5161 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
5162
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005163Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005164-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005165
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005166Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005167----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005168
5169- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
5170 removed completely in the next release.
5171
5172- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
5173 OSX.
5174
5175- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
5176 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
5177
5178- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
5179
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005180
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005181What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005182===========================
5183
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005184*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
5185
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005186Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005187--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005188
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005189- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005190 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005191 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005192 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
5193 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005194 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
5195 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005196 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
5197 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00005198
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00005199- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
5200 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
5201
5202- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
5203 class methods, static methods, and properties.
5204
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005205Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005206-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005207
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00005208- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
5209 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
5210 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
5211 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
5212 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
5213 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
5214 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
5215 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
5216
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005217- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
5218 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
5219 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
5220 example).
5221
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005222- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005223 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005224 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005225 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005226
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005227- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
5228 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
5229 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00005230 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005231
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005232- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
5233 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
5234 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
5235 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
5236 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
5237 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
5238
5239 isinstance(x, (A, B))
5240
5241 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
5242
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005243Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005244-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005245
5246- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
5247
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005248- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
5249
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005250- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
5251 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00005252
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005253- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
5254 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
5255 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
5256 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
5257 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
5258 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00005259 attributes.
5260
5261- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
5262 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
5263 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00005264
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005265- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
5266 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
5267 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005268
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005269- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
5270 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
5271 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005272 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
5273 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
5274
5275- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
5276 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005277
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005278Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005279-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005280
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00005281- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
5282 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
5283
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005284- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
5285 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
5286 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
5287 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
5288
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00005289- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
5290 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
5291 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
5292 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
5293
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00005294 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
5295 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
5296 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
5297 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
5298 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
5299 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
5300 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
5301 without losing information).
5302
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005303- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005304 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
5305 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
5306 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
5307 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
5308 module).
5309
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00005310 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005311 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
5312 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
5313 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
5314 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005315
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005316- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00005317 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
5318 encoding.
5319
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00005320- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
5321 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
5322
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005323- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005324 to allow saving the message body to a file.
5325
5326- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
5327 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
5328 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
5329 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
5330
5331- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
5332
5333- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
5334 ON, and OFF.
5335
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005336- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
5337 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
5338
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005339Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005340-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005341
5342- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
5343 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
5344 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005345
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005346- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
5347 been added: -X and -E.
5348
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005349Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005350-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005351
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005352- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
5353 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
5354
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005355C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005356-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005357
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00005358- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
5359 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
5360 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
5361 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
5362 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
5363
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00005364- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
5365 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
5366 as long) arguments.
5367
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005368- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
5369 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
5370 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
5371 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
5372 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
5373 report any bugs or strange behavior).
5374
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005375- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
5376 input.
5377
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005378New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005379-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005380
5381Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005382-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005383
5384Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005385-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005386
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00005387- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
5388 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
5389 is created for .py and .pyw files.
5390
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005391- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
5392 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
5393 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005394 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005395
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005396 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
5397 # (SIGINT) behavior.
5398 import signal
5399 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005400
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005401 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005402 while 1:
5403 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005404 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005405 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
5406 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
5407 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
5408 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005409
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005410
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005411What's New in Python 2.2a4?
5412===========================
5413
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005414*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
5415
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005416Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005417--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005418
5419- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
5420 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
5421 documentation for all operations on list objects.
5422
5423- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
5424 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
5425 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
5426 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
5427 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
5428 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
5429 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005430
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005431- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005432 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005433 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
5434 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
5435 associate a docstring with a property.
5436
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005437- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
5438 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5439 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5440 other built-in object types.
5441
5442- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5443 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5444 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5445 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5446 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5447
5448- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5449 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5450
5451- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5452 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005453 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005454 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5455 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5456 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5457 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5458 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5459
5460- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5461 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5462 class.
5463
5464- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5465 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5466 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5467 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5468
5469- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5470 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5471 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5472 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5473
5474- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5475 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5476
5477- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5478 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5479 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5480 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5481 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005482 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005483 with the same value as s.
5484
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005485- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5486
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005487Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005488----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005489
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005490- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5491
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005492- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5493 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5494 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5495 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5496 objects.
5497
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005498- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5499 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005500 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5501 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5502
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005503- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5504 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5505 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5506
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005507Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005508-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005509
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005510- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5511 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5512 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5513 by the instances.
5514
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005515- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5516 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5517 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5518
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005519- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5520 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5521 before the entire comparison is complete.
5522
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005523- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5524 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5525 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5526
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005527- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5528 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5529 getwriter().
5530
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005531- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5532 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5533
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005534- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005535 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5536 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5537
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005538- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5539 iterable object.
5540
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005541- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5542 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005543
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005544- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5545 authentication.
5546
5547- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5548 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005549
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005550- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005551 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5552 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5553 a sample driver.)
5554
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005555Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005556-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005557
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005558- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5559 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5560 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5561 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5562 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5563 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5564 kernel has large file support.
5565
5566- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5567 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5568 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5569 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5570 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5571
5572- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5573 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5574 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5575
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005576C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005577-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005578
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005579- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5580 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5581
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005582New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005583-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005584
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005585- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5586 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5587
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005588Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005589-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005590
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005591- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5592 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5593 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5594 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5595 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5596
5597- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5598 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5599 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5600 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5601
5602- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5603 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5604
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005605Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005606-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005607
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005608- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005609 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5610 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005611
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005612
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005613What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5614===========================
5615
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005616*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5617
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005618Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005619----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005620
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005621- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5622 big to represent as a C double.
5623
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005624- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5625 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5626 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5627 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5628 restriction).
5629
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005630- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5631 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5632 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5633 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5634 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5635
5636 >>> dir([])
5637 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5638 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5639 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5640 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5641 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5642 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5643 'reverse', 'sort']
5644
5645 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5646
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005647- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005648 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5649 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5650 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5651 OverflowError exception.
5652
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005653- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005654 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005655 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5656 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5657 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5658 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5659 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005660 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005661 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5662 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5663
5664 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5665 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5666 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5667 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005668
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005669- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005670 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5671 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5672 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5673 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5674 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5675 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5676 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5677 once it is created.
5678
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005679- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5680 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5681 (key, value) pairs.
5682
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005683- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005684 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5685 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5686
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005687- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5688 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5689 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5690 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5691 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005692
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005693- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005694 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5695 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5696
5697 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5698
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005699- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005700 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5701
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005702Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005703-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005704
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005705- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005706 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5707 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005708
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005709- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5710 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5711 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5712 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5713 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5714 in this area anymore).
5715
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005716- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5717 threading.Timer.
5718
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005719- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5720 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5721
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005722- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005723 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5724
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005725- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005726 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5727 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5728 converted to Python longs.
5729
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005730- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005731 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5732
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005733- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5734 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5735 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5736
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005737Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005738-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005739
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005740- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5741 division operators as per PEP 238.
5742
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005743Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005744-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005745
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005746- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5747 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5748 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5749 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5750
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005751C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005752-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005753
5754- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005755
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005756- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5757 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005758 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005759
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005760 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5761 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005762 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005763 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005764
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005765- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005766 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5767 module:
5768
5769 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005770
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005771 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5772 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005773
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005774 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5775 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005776
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005777 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5778
5779 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5780
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005781- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005782 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5783 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5784 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005785
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005786New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005787-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005788
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005789- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5790 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5791 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5792 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5793 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005794
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005795Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005796-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005797
5798Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005799-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005800
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005801- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5802 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5803 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5804 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005805 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5806 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5807 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5808 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5809 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005810
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005811- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005812 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5813
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005814
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005815What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5816===========================
5817
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005818*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5819
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005820Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005821-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005822
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005823- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5824 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5825
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005826- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5827 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5828 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005829
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005830- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5831 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5832 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5833 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005834
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005835- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5836
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005837- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005838
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005839Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005840-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005841
5842- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005843 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005844 the module docstring for details.
5845
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005846Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005847-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005848
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005849- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005850 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5851 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5852 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005853
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005854- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5855 Nick Mathewson.
5856
5857Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005858----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005859
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005860- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5861 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5862 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5863 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5864 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5865 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5866 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5867 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5868
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005869- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5870 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5871 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5872 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5873
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005874- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5875 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5876 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5877 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5878 come a long way).
5879
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005880- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5881 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5882 write filters for these warnings).
5883
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005884- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5885 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5886 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5887 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5888 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5889
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005890- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5891 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5892 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5893 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5894 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5895 older distribution.
5896
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005897Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005898-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005899
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005900- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5901 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005902 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005903
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005904- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5905 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5906 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5907
5908- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5909
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005910- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5911
5912- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5913
5914- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5915
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005916- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005917
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005918- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5919
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005920New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005921-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005922
5923C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005924-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005925
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005926- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5927 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5928 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5929 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5930 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5931 against buffer overruns.
5932
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005933- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005934 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5935 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005936 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5937 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5938 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5939
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005940- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5941 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5942 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5943 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5944 deprecated.
5945
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005946Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005947-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005948
5949- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5950 relevant is found.
5951
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005952
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005953What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005954===========================
5955
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005956*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5957
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005958Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005959----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005960
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005961- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5962 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5963 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5964 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5965 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5966 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5967 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5968 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005969 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005970 repaired.
5971
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005972- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005973 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005974 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5975 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5976 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5977 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5978 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5979 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5980 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5981 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5982
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005983- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5984 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5985 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5986 leading BMO character).
5987
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005988- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5989 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5990 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5991
5992 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5993 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5994 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005995
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005996 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5997 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5998 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5999 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
6000 for various simple to use conversions.
6001
6002 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
6003 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
6004
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006005 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
6006 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
6007 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
6008 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
6009 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
6010 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
6011 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
6012 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
6013 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
6014 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
6015 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
6016 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
6017 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
6018 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
6019 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00006020
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00006021- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
6022 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
6023 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00006024 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00006025 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00006026
6027 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00006028 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
6029 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
6030 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
6031 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
6032 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006033 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
6034 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00006035
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006036 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
6037 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
6038 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00006039 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00006040
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00006041- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
6042 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
6043 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
6044 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
6045 floating arithmetic,
6046
6047 x = 9007199254740992.0
6048 print long(x)
6049
6050 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
6051 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
6052 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
6053 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
6054 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
6055 functions are of good quality).
6056
6057 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
6058 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
6059 algorithms to break.
6060
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00006061- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
6062 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
6063 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
6064 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
6065 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
6066 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
6067 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
6068 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
6069 order.
6070
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00006071- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
6072 operation along the most common code paths.
6073
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00006074- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
6075 the same as dict.has_key(x).
6076
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00006077- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
6078 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
6079 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
6080 {}.update(UserDict())
6081
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00006082- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
6083 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
6084 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
6085 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
6086 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
6087 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
6088 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
6089 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
6090
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00006091- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00006092 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006093
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00006094 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00006095 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
6096 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00006097 join() method of strings
6098 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00006099 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
6100 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006101 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00006102 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00006103
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00006104- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
6105 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
6106
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00006107- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
6108 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
6109
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00006110- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
6111 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
6112 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
6113 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
6114
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00006115- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
6116 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00006117 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00006118 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
6119 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00006120
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00006121- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
6122
6123
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006124Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006125-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006126
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00006127- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006128 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00006129 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
6130 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
6131
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00006132- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
6133 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
6134
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00006135- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
6136 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
6137 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
6138 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
6139
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00006140- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
6141 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
6142 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
6143
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00006144- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
6145
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00006146- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
6147
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00006148- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
6149 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
6150 that are still imported into string.py).
6151
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006152- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
6153
6154- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
6155 Now it does.
6156
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00006157- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
6158
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00006159- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
6160 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
6161 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
6162 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
6163 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00006164 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
6165 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00006166
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00006167- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
6168 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
6169 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
6170 'help(object)'.
6171
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006172Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006173-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006174
6175- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006176 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006177 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
6178 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
6179
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006180- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00006181 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
6182 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006183
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00006184C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006185-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00006186
6187- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
6188 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006189
6190----
6191
6192**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**