blob: 1c142fb176f6630856f3383a1e2db64b2ec95600 [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
Georg Brandl533ff6f2006-03-08 18:09:27 +000015- Patch #1434038: property() now uses the getter's docstring if there is
16 no "doc" argument given. This makes it possible to legitimately use
17 property() as a decorator to produce a read-only property.
18
Guido van Rossum9aa37ab2006-03-07 18:54:08 +000019- PEP 357, patch 1436368: add an __index__ method to int/long and a matching
20 nb_index slot to the PyNumberMethods struct. The slot is consulted instead
21 of requiring an int or long in slicing and a few other contexts, enabling
22 other objects (e.g. Numeric Python's integers) to be used as slice indices.
23
Neal Norwitz995acdf2006-03-07 05:01:00 +000024- Fixed various bugs reported by Coverity's Prevent tool.
25
Brett Cannonbf364092006-03-01 04:25:17 +000026- PEP 352, patch #1104669: Make exceptions new-style objects. Introduced the
27 new exception base class, BaseException, which has a new message attribute.
28 KeyboardInterrupt and SystemExit to directly inherit from BaseException now.
29 Raising a string exception now raises a DeprecationWarning.
30
Thomas Woutersfb609f42006-02-28 16:37:25 +000031- Patch #1438387, PEP 328: relative and absolute imports. Imports can now be
32 explicitly relative, using 'from .module import name' to mean 'from the same
33 package as this module is in. Imports without dots still default to the
34 old relative-then-absolute, unless 'from __future__ import
35 absolute_import' is used.
36
Brett Cannona7446e32006-02-27 23:39:10 +000037- Properly check if 'warnings' raises an exception (usually when a filter set
38 to "error" is triggered) when raising a warning for raising string
39 exceptions.
40
Neal Norwitz0023a2f2006-02-27 23:24:48 +000041- CO_GENERATOR_ALLOWED is no longer defined, this behavior is the default.
42 The name was removed from Include/code.h.
43
Neal Norwitzeb651252006-02-27 16:47:12 +000044- PEP 308: conditional expressions were added (x if cond else y).
45
Guido van Rossum1968ad32006-02-25 22:38:04 +000046- Patch 1433928:
47 - The copy module now "copies" function objects (as atomic objects).
48 - dict.__getitem__ now looks for a __missing__ hook before raising
49 KeyError.
50
Tim Peters84ef21c2006-02-28 20:39:06 +000051- PEP 343: with statement implemented. Needs ``from __future__ import
52 with_statement``. Use of 'with' as a variable will generate a warning.
53 Use of 'as' as a variable will also generate a warning (unless it's
Neal Norwitz055ec242006-02-28 20:06:49 +000054 part of an import statement).
Guido van Rossum1a5e21e2006-02-28 21:57:43 +000055 The following objects have __context__ methods:
56 - The built-in file type.
57 - The thread.LockType type.
58 - The following types defined by the threading module:
59 Lock, RLock, Condition, Semaphore, BoundedSemaphore.
60 - The decimal.Context class.
Guido van Rossumc2e20742006-02-27 22:32:47 +000061
Marc-André Lemburgfe4b34c2006-02-19 15:22:22 +000062- Fix the encodings package codec search function to only search
63 inside its own package. Fixes problem reported in patch #1433198.
64
65 Note: Codec packages should implement and register their own
66 codec search function. PEP 100 has the details.
67
Martin v. Löwis18e16552006-02-15 17:27:45 +000068- PEP 353: Using ssize_t as the index type.
69
Neal Norwitzfc76d632006-01-10 06:03:13 +000070- Patch #1400181, fix unicode string formatting to not use the locale.
71 This is how string objects work. u'%f' could use , instead of .
72 for the decimal point. Now both strings and unicode always use periods.
73
Neal Norwitz671b9e32006-01-09 07:07:12 +000074- Bug #1244610, #1392915, fix build problem on OpenBSD 3.7 and 3.8.
75 configure would break checking curses.h.
76
Georg Brandlcd4d1e82005-12-27 17:37:07 +000077- Bug #959576: The pwd module is now builtin. This allows Python to be
78 built on UNIX platforms without $HOME set.
79
Neal Norwitzc10978f2005-12-19 06:07:16 +000080- Bug #1072182, fix some potential problems if characters are signed.
81
Neal Norwitz5d0ad502005-12-19 04:27:42 +000082- Bug #889500, fix line number on SyntaxWarning for global declarations.
83
Neal Norwitzdb83eb32005-12-18 05:29:30 +000084- Bug #1378022, UTF-8 files with a leading BOM crashed the interpreter.
85
Neal Norwitze7214a12005-12-18 05:03:17 +000086- Support for converting hex strings to floats no longer works.
87 This was not portable. float('0x3') now raises a ValueError.
88
Barry Warsaw2a38a862005-12-18 01:27:35 +000089- Patch #1382163: Expose Subversion revision number to Python. New C API
Barry Warsawd3c38ff2006-03-07 09:46:03 +000090 function Py_GetBuildNumber(). New attribute sys.subversion. Build number
Barry Warsaw2a38a862005-12-18 01:27:35 +000091 is now displayed in interactive prompt banner.
92
Georg Brandlfa166682005-12-17 21:45:17 +000093- Implementation of PEP 341 - Unification of try/except and try/finally.
94 "except" clauses can now be written together with a "finally" clause in
Neal Norwitz11ca77e2005-12-17 22:24:12 +000095 one try statement instead of two nested ones. Patch #1355913.
Georg Brandlfa166682005-12-17 21:45:17 +000096
Hye-Shik Chang835b2432005-12-17 04:38:31 +000097- Bug #1379994: Builtin unicode_escape and raw_unicode_escape codec
98 now encodes backslash correctly.
99
Martin v. Löwisb45b3152005-11-28 17:34:23 +0000100- Patch #1350409: Work around signal handling bug in Visual Studio 2005.
101
Georg Brandlf06e30a2005-11-24 15:37:42 +0000102- Bug #1281408: Py_BuildValue now works correct even with unsigned longs
103 and long longs.
104
Neal Norwitz67715f02005-11-09 06:59:35 +0000105- SF Bug #1350188, "setdlopenflags" leads to crash upon "import"
106 It was possible dlerror() returns a NULL pointer, use a default error
107 message in this case.
108
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +0000109- Replaced most Unicode charmap codecs with new ones using the
110 new Unicode translate string feature in the builtin charmap
111 codec; the codecs were created from the mapping tables available
112 at ftp.unicode.org and contain a few updates (e.g. the Mac OS
113 encodings now include a mapping for the Apple logo)
114
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000115- Added a few more codecs for Mac OS encodings
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +0000116
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +0000117- Speed up some Unicode operations.
118
Martin v. Löwisbd260da2006-02-26 19:42:26 +0000119- A new AST parser implementation was completed. The abstract
120 syntax tree is available for read-only (non-compile) access
Martin v. Löwis577b5b92006-02-27 15:23:19 +0000121 to Python code; an _ast module was added.
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +0000122
Neal Norwitzb6570f52005-10-21 06:26:10 +0000123- SF bug #1167751: fix incorrect code being for generator expressions.
Neal Norwitz16af7342005-10-21 06:25:33 +0000124 The following code now raises a SyntaxError: foo(a = i for i in range(10))
125
Neal Norwitz708e51a2005-10-03 04:48:15 +0000126- SF Bug #976608: fix SystemError when mtime of an imported file is -1.
127
Neal Norwitz11bd1192005-10-03 00:54:56 +0000128- SF Bug #887946: fix segfault when redirecting stdin from a directory.
129 Provide a warning when a directory is passed on the command line.
130
Neal Norwitz40d37812005-10-02 01:48:49 +0000131- Fix segfault with invalid coding.
132
133- SF bug #772896: unknown encoding results in MemoryError.
134
Raymond Hettinger6b27cda2005-09-24 21:23:05 +0000135- All iterators now have a Boolean value of true. Formerly, some iterators
136 supported a __len__() method which evaluated to False when the iterator
137 was empty.
138
Guido van Rossum630db602005-09-20 18:49:54 +0000139- On 64-bit platforms, when __len__() returns a value that cannot be
140 represented as a C int, raise OverflowError.
141
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +0000142- test__locale is skipped on OS X < 10.4 (only partial locale support is
Walter Dörwald6611a8b2005-10-09 19:28:35 +0000143 present).
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +0000144
Georg Brandl80bbf3f2005-09-14 19:38:29 +0000145- SF bug #893549: parsing keyword arguments was broken with a few format
146 codes.
147
Guido van Rossum8ee3e5a2005-09-14 18:09:42 +0000148- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on AIX 5.3
149 with IBM's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1284289). This also closes SF
150 bug #105470: test_pwd fails on 64bit system (Opteron).
151
Guido van Rossum539c6622005-09-14 17:49:54 +0000152- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on HP-UX 11 on
153 Itanium2 with HP's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1225212).
154
Georg Brandl4550b8d2005-08-26 06:43:52 +0000155- Disallow keyword arguments for type constructors that don't use them
Georg Brandl02c42872005-08-26 06:42:30 +0000156 (fixes bug #1119418).
157
Martin v. Löwisd35edda2005-08-24 08:39:24 +0000158- Forward UnicodeDecodeError into SyntaxError for source encoding errors.
159
Barry Warsawe2eca0b2005-08-15 18:14:19 +0000160- SF bug #900092: When tracing (e.g. for hotshot), restore 'return' events for
161 exceptions that cause a function to exit.
162
Raymond Hettinger9f1a6792005-07-31 01:16:36 +0000163- The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
164 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
165 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
166
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +0000167- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
168
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +0000169- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
170 reference counts in some error exit cases.
171
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000172- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
173 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
174 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
175 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
176 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
177 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
178 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
179 realloc.
180
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +0000181- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
182 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
183
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +0000184- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
185 like their int counterparts.
186
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +0000187- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
188 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
189 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
190 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
191 for a longer write-up of the problem).
192
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +0000193- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
194 serializing floats.
195
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +0000196- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
197 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
198 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
199
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +0000200- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
201 278.
202
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000203- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
204 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
205 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
206 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000207 to the base class has been moved to the proper nb_* magic slot and out of
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000208 PyNumber_*().
209 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
210
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +0000211- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
212 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
213 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
214 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
215
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +0000216- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
217 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
218 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
219 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
220 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
221
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +0000222- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
223 disabled caused a crash.
224
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000225- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
226 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
227
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000228- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +0000229 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
230
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +0000231- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
232
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000233- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +0000234 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
235 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
236 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000237
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +0000238- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
239
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +0000240- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
241 returning None.
242
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000243- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +0000244 ('\') with a specific error message.
245
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +0000246- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
247
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +0000248- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
249 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
250
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000251- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000252 an ferror() call.
253
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000254- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
255 list.sort().
256
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000257- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
258 (2+3) --> (5).
259
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000260- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
261
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000262- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
263 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000264
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000265- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
266 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
267 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
268
Neil Schemenauercf52c072005-08-12 17:34:58 +0000269- Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a
270 unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and
271 calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance.
272
Tim Petersf4e69282006-02-27 17:15:31 +0000273- Patch #1413181: changed ``PyThreadState_Delete()`` to forget about the
274 current thread state when the auto-GIL-state machinery knows about
275 it (since the thread state is being deleted, continuing to remember it
276 can't help, but can hurt if another thread happens to get created with
277 the same thread id).
278
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000279Extension Modules
280-----------------
281
Hye-Shik Changabb903f2006-03-13 10:20:08 +0000282- Bug #1448490: Fixed a bug that ISO-2022 codecs could not handle
283 SS2 (single-shift 2) escape sequences correctly.
284
Martin v. Löwis480f1bb2006-03-09 23:38:20 +0000285- The unicodedata module was updated to the 4.1 version of the Unicode
286 database. The 3.2 version is still available as unicodedata.db_3_2_0
287 for applications that require this specific version (such as IDNA).
288
Neal Norwitzb62c4332006-03-04 18:35:47 +0000289- The timing module is no longer built by default. It was deprecated
290 in PEP 4 in Python 2.0 or earlier.
291
Guido van Rossum1968ad32006-02-25 22:38:04 +0000292- Patch 1433928: Added a new type, defaultdict, to the collections module.
293 This uses the new __missing__ hook behavior added to dict (see above).
294
Georg Brandldbd83392006-02-20 09:42:33 +0000295- Bug #854823: socketmodule now builds on Sun platforms even when
296 INET_ADDRSTRLEN is not defined.
297
Georg Brandlf4f44152006-02-18 22:29:33 +0000298- Patch #1393157: os.startfile() now has an optional argument to specify
299 a "command verb" to invoke on the file.
300
Neal Norwitz082b2df2006-02-07 07:04:46 +0000301- Bug #876637, prevent stack corruption when socket descriptor
302 is larger than FD_SETSIZE.
303
Neal Norwitz0e6bc8c2006-02-05 05:45:43 +0000304- Patch #1407135, bug #1424041: harmonize mmap behavior of anonymous memory.
305 mmap.mmap(-1, size) now returns anonymous memory in both Unix and Windows.
306 mmap.mmap(0, size) should not be used on Windows for anonymous memory.
307
Martin v. Löwis57a34e82006-02-04 19:12:37 +0000308- Patch #1422385: The nis module now supports access to domains other
309 than the system default domain.
310
Martin v. Löwis14694662006-02-03 12:54:16 +0000311- Use Win32 API to implement os.stat/fstat. As a result, subsecond timestamps
312 are reported, the limit on path name lengths is removed, and stat reports
313 WindowsError now (instead of OSError).
314
Gregory P. Smithcfc4a8d2006-01-29 19:46:23 +0000315- Add bsddb.db.DBEnv.set_tx_timestamp allowing time based database recovery.
316
Neal Norwitz62a21122006-01-25 05:21:55 +0000317- Bug #1413192, fix seg fault in bsddb if a transaction was deleted
318 before the env.
319
Martin v. Löwis11017b12006-01-14 18:12:57 +0000320- Patch #1103116: Basic AF_NETLINK support.
321
Neal Norwitz3b4fff82006-01-11 08:54:45 +0000322- Bug #1402308, (possible) segfault when using mmap.mmap(-1, ...)
323
Neal Norwitz88bbd732006-01-10 07:05:44 +0000324- Bug #1400822, _curses over{lay,write} doesn't work when passing 6 ints.
325 Also fix ungetmouse() which did not accept arguments properly.
326 The code now conforms to the documented signature.
327
Neal Norwitz5e3d8622006-01-09 06:24:35 +0000328- Bug #1400115, Fix segfault when calling curses.panel.userptr()
329 without prior setting of the userptr.
330
Neal Norwitz40c6b472006-01-05 05:43:35 +0000331- Fix 64-bit problems in bsddb.
332
Neal Norwitz8856fb72005-12-18 03:34:22 +0000333- Patch #1365916: fix some unsafe 64-bit mmap methods.
334
Hye-Shik Changc5c57e62005-12-12 11:48:32 +0000335- Bug #1290333: Added a workaround for cjkcodecs' _codecs_cn build
336 problem on AIX.
337
Georg Brandla13c2442005-11-22 19:30:31 +0000338- Bug #869197: os.setgroups rejects long integer arguments
339
Neal Norwitz0f46bbf2005-11-03 05:00:25 +0000340- Bug #1346533, select.poll() doesn't raise an error if timeout > sys.maxint
341
Neal Norwitz7b631792005-11-02 05:26:07 +0000342- Bug #1344508, Fix UNIX mmap leaking file descriptors
343
Neal Norwitzf3396542005-10-28 05:52:22 +0000344- Patch #1338314, Bug #1336623: fix tarfile so it can extract
345 REGTYPE directories from tarfiles written by old programs.
346
Gregory P. Smithe101df92006-01-24 20:09:45 +0000347- Patch #1407992, fixes broken bsddb module db associate when using
348 BerkeleyDB 3.3, 4.0 or 4.1.
349
350- Get bsddb module to build with BerkeleyDB version 4.4
351
352- Get bsddb module to build with BerkeleyDB version 3.2
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +0000353
Neal Norwitz484d9a42005-09-30 04:46:49 +0000354- Patch #1309009, Fix segfault in pyexpat when the XML document is in latin_1,
355 but Python incorrectly assumes it is in UTF-8 format
356
Georg Brandle677adc2005-09-29 13:40:49 +0000357- Fix parse errors in the readline module when compiling without threads.
358
Hye-Shik Chang9ceebd52005-09-24 14:58:47 +0000359- Patch #1288833: Removed thread lock from socket.getaddrinfo on
360 FreeBSD 5.3 and later versions which got thread-safe getaddrinfo(3).
361
Michael W. Hudson10402a32005-09-22 09:19:01 +0000362- Patches #1298449 and #1298499: Add some missing checks for error
363 returns in cStringIO.c.
364
Neal Norwitz058bde12005-09-21 06:44:25 +0000365- Patch #1297028: fix segfault if call type on MultibyteCodec,
366 MultibyteStreamReader, or MultibyteStreamWriter
367
Neal Norwitzcfe7dd92005-09-19 06:49:27 +0000368- Fix memory leak in posix.access().
369
Martin v. Löwis8b291e22005-09-18 08:17:56 +0000370- Patch #1213831: Fix typo in unicodedata._getcode.
371
Georg Brandlfb1ef852005-09-14 20:53:32 +0000372- Bug #1007046: os.startfile() did not accept unicode strings encoded in
373 the file system encoding.
374
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000375- Patch #756021: Special-case socket.inet_aton('255.255.255.255') for
376 platforms that don't have inet_aton().
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000377
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000378- Bug #1215928: Fix bz2.BZ2File.seek() for 64-bit file offsets.
379
380- Bug #1191043: Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines for files containing one
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000381 line without newlines.
382
Georg Brandl38387b82005-08-24 07:17:40 +0000383- Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did
384 on Windows.
385
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000386- Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
Martin v. Löwisebd9d5b2005-08-09 15:00:59 +0000387 st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
388
Michael W. Hudson8137bea2005-07-27 20:24:40 +0000389- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
390 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
391 for large or negative values.
392
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000393- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000394 implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false.
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000395
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000396- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
397
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000398- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
399 if available on the platform.
400
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000401- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
402 available on the platform.
403
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000404- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
405 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
406
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000407- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
408
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000409- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
410 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
411 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
412
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000413- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
414
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000415- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
416 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
417
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000418- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000419 file size.
420
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000421- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
422
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000423- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
424 {remove_history,replace_history}
425
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000426- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
427 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000428
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000429- stat_float_times is now True.
430
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000431- array.array objects are now picklable.
432
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000433- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
434 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
435
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000436- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
437 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
438 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
439
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000440- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
441 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000442
443Library
444-------
445
Martin v. Löwis04824ce2006-03-10 21:26:16 +0000446- A regrtest option -w was added to re-run failed tests in verbose mode.
447
Georg Brandle2b46772006-03-09 23:22:43 +0000448- Patch #1446372: quit and exit can now be called from the interactive
449 interpreter to exit.
450
Barry Warsawd3c38ff2006-03-07 09:46:03 +0000451- The function get_count() has been added to the gc module, and gc.collect()
452 grew an optional 'generation' argument.
453
Martin v. Löwisfbab90e2006-03-05 13:36:04 +0000454- A library msilib to generate Windows Installer files, and a distutils
455 command bdist_msi have been added.
456
Guido van Rossum1a5e21e2006-02-28 21:57:43 +0000457- PEP 343: new module contextlib.py defines decorator @contextmanager
458 and helpful context managers nested() and closing().
459
Martin v. Löwis415ed932006-02-27 19:56:30 +0000460- The compiler package now supports future imports after the module docstring.
461
Georg Brandl8f7c54e2006-02-20 08:40:38 +0000462- Bug #1413790: zipfile now sanitizes absolute archive names that are
463 not allowed by the specs.
464
Georg Brandlc98eeed2006-02-19 14:57:47 +0000465- Patch #1215184: FileInput now can be given an opening hook which can
466 be used to control how files are opened.
467
Georg Brandlc029f872006-02-19 14:12:34 +0000468- Patch #1212287: fileinput.input() now has a mode parameter for
469 specifying the file mode input files should be opened with.
470
Georg Brandl67e9fb92006-02-19 13:56:17 +0000471- Patch #1215184: fileinput now has a fileno() function for getting the
472 current file number.
473
Georg Brandl602b9ba2006-02-19 13:26:36 +0000474- Patch #1349274: gettext.install() now optionally installs additional
475 translation functions other than _() in the builtin namespace.
476
Georg Brandle4662172006-02-19 09:51:27 +0000477- Patch #1337756: fileinput now accepts Unicode filenames.
478
Georg Brandl7b4e7c22006-02-18 21:10:56 +0000479- Patch #1373643: The chunk module can now read chunks larger than
480 two gigabytes.
481
Georg Brandl21dd1af2006-02-17 13:35:13 +0000482- Patch #1417555: SimpleHTTPServer now returns Last-Modified headers.
483
Georg Brandlbd3bc4d2006-02-17 09:52:53 +0000484- Bug #1430298: It is now possible to send a mail with an empty
485 return address using smtplib.
486
Georg Brandl0e1abe22006-02-17 09:48:14 +0000487- Bug #1432260: The names of lambda functions are now properly displayed
488 in pydoc.
Georg Brandl501dd0d2006-02-17 09:45:40 +0000489
Martin v. Löwis00756902006-02-05 17:09:41 +0000490- Patch #1412872: zipfile now sets the creator system to 3 (Unix)
491 unless the system is Win32.
492
Tim Petersda1329b2006-02-27 16:50:01 +0000493- Patch #1349118: urllib now supports user:pass@ style proxy
Martin v. Löwis3e865952006-01-24 15:51:21 +0000494 specifications, raises IOErrors when proxies for unsupported protocols
495 are defined, and uses the https proxy on https redirections.
496
Georg Brandl531ceba2006-01-21 07:20:56 +0000497- Bug #902075: urllib2 now supports 'host:port' style proxy specifications.
498
499- Bug #1407902: Add support for sftp:// URIs to urlparse.
Georg Brandl89f35ac2006-01-20 17:24:23 +0000500
Georg Brandlb709c2c2006-01-20 09:07:35 +0000501- Bug #1371247: Update Windows locale identifiers in locale.py.
502
Neal Norwitzf60cd472006-01-14 07:05:13 +0000503- Bug #1394565: SimpleHTTPServer now doesn't choke on query parameters
Georg Brandl45ab2332006-01-13 17:05:56 +0000504 any more.
Georg Brandlb709c2c2006-01-20 09:07:35 +0000505
Georg Brandl4edd9892006-01-13 16:59:46 +0000506- Bug #1403410: The warnings module now doesn't get confused
507 when it can't find out the module name it generates a warning for.
Georg Brandlb709c2c2006-01-20 09:07:35 +0000508
Martin v. Löwis412ed3b2006-01-08 10:45:39 +0000509- Patch #1177307: Added a new codec utf_8_sig for UTF-8 with a BOM signature.
510
Neal Norwitzab86f8e2005-12-23 21:44:36 +0000511- Patch #1157027: cookielib mishandles RFC 2109 cookies in Netscape mode
512
Neal Norwitz338e7862005-12-23 21:27:46 +0000513- Patch #1117398: cookielib.LWPCookieJar and .MozillaCookieJar now raise
514 LoadError as documented, instead of IOError. For compatibility,
515 LoadError subclasses IOError.
516
Brett Cannon3cbd0382005-12-16 22:49:23 +0000517- Added the hashlib module. It provides secure hash functions for MD5 and
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000518 SHA1, 224, 256, 384, and 512. Note that recent developments make the
519 historic MD5 and SHA1 unsuitable for cryptographic-strength applications.
520 In <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-December/058850.html>
521 Ronald L. Rivest offered this advice for Python:
522
523 "The consensus of researchers in this area (at least as
524 expressed at the NIST Hash Function Workshop 10/31/05),
525 is that SHA-256 is a good choice for the time being, but
526 that research should continue, and other alternatives may
527 arise from this research. The larger SHA's also seem OK."
Brett Cannon3cbd0382005-12-16 22:49:23 +0000528
Fredrik Lundh7e0aef02005-12-12 18:54:55 +0000529- Added a subset of Fredrik Lundh's ElementTree package. Available
530 modules are xml.etree.ElementTree, xml.etree.ElementPath, and
531 xml.etree.ElementInclude, from ElementTree 1.2.6.
532
Martin v. Löwis307021f2005-11-27 16:59:04 +0000533- Patch #1162825: Support non-ASCII characters in IDLE window titles.
534
Georg Brandl1f663572005-11-26 16:50:44 +0000535- Bug #1365984: urllib now opens "data:" URLs again.
536
Brett Cannonad07ff22005-11-23 02:15:50 +0000537- Patch #1314396: prevent deadlock for threading.Thread.join() when an exception
538 is raised within the method itself on a previous call (e.g., passing in an
539 illegal argument)
540
Brett Cannon5d0bf942005-11-02 23:04:26 +0000541- Bug #1340337: change time.strptime() to always return ValueError when there
542 is an error in the format string.
543
Georg Brandle8f24432005-10-03 14:16:44 +0000544- Patch #754022: Greatly enhanced webbrowser.py (by Oleg Broytmann).
545
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000546- Bug #729103: pydoc.py: Fix docother() method to accept additional
Georg Brandl8b813db2005-10-01 16:32:31 +0000547 "parent" argument.
548
Georg Brandlaa935172005-09-29 20:49:16 +0000549- Patch #1300515: xdrlib.py: Fix pack_fstring() to really use null bytes
550 for padding.
551
Georg Brandl80ba8e82005-09-29 20:16:07 +0000552- Bug #1296004: httplib.py: Limit maximal amount of data read from the
553 socket to avoid a MemoryError on Windows.
554
Matthias Klosef3f231f2005-09-20 07:02:49 +0000555- Patch #1166948: locale.py: Prefer LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE and LANG over LANGUAGE
556 to get the correct encoding.
557
558- Patch #1166938: locale.py: Parse LANGUAGE as a colon separated list of
559 languages.
560
Martin v. Löwis4ed67382005-09-18 08:34:39 +0000561- Patch #1268314: Cache lines in StreamReader.readlines for performance.
562
Brett Cannona783d062005-09-15 02:34:56 +0000563- Bug #1290505: Fix clearing the regex cache for time.strptime().
564
Martin v. Löwis5dbdc592005-08-27 10:07:56 +0000565- Bug #1167128: Fix size of a symlink in a tarfile to be 0.
566
Georg Brandl5a650a22005-08-26 08:51:34 +0000567- Patch #810023: Fix off-by-one bug in urllib.urlretrieve reporthook
568 functionality.
569
Martin v. Löwis8b595142005-08-25 11:03:38 +0000570- Bug #1163178: Make IDNA return an empty string when the input is empty.
571
Georg Brandl532efab2005-08-24 22:34:21 +0000572- Patch #848017: Make Cookie more RFC-compliant. Use CRLF as default output
573 separator and do not output trailing semicola.
574
Georg Brandlb9256022005-08-24 18:46:39 +0000575- Patch #1062060: urllib.urlretrieve() now raises a new exception, named
576 ContentTooShortException, when the actually downloaded size does not
577 match the Content-Length header.
578
Martin v. Löwis0a5d4a22005-08-24 14:55:22 +0000579- Bug #1121494: distutils.dir_utils.mkpath now accepts Unicode strings.
580
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000581- Bug #1178484: Return complete lines from codec stream readers
582 even if there is an exception in later lines, resulting in
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000583 correct line numbers for decoding errors in source code.
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000584
Georg Brandl6d2b3462005-08-24 07:36:17 +0000585- Bug #1192315: Disallow negative arguments to clear() in pdb.
586
Martin v. Löwisb813c532005-08-07 20:51:04 +0000587- Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
588
Georg Brandl649f8e72005-08-03 07:30:12 +0000589- Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
590 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
591
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000592- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
593 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
594 Tkdnd.
595
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000596- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
597 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
598
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000599- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
600 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
601
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000602- textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000603 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
604
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000605- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
606 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
607
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000608- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
609 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
610
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000611- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000612 it can be missing in embedded interpreters
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000613
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000614- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
615
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000616- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
617 error messages.
618
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000619- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
620
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000621- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
622 Bug #1224621.
623
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000624- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
625 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
626 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
627 terminates by raising StopIteration.
628
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000629- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
630
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000631- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
632 component of the path.
633
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000634- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
635 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
636 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
637 class at all.
638
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000639- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
640 files to PyPI.
641
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000642- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
643 them to PyPI.
644
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000645- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
646 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
647 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
648 work as expected.
649
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000650- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
651 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
652
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000653- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000654 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
655
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000656- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
657
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000658- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
659 to build.
660
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000661- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
662 symbolic links on Windows.
663
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000664- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000665 profile.py if available.
666
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000667- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
668
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000669- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
670 in LWPCookieJar.
671
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000672- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
673
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000674- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
675
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000676- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
677
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000678- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
679
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000680- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
681
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000682- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
683
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000684- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
685
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000686- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
687
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000688- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
689 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
690 be exploited in various ways.
691
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000692- Bug #1222790: in SimpleXMLRPCServer, set the reuse-address and close-on-exec
Andrew M. Kuchling3a976052005-12-04 15:07:41 +0000693 flags on the HTTP listening socket.
694
Andrew M. Kuchlinge63fde72005-12-04 15:36:57 +0000695- Bug #792570: SimpleXMLRPCServer had problems if the request grew too large.
696 Fixed by reading the HTTP body in chunks instead of one big socket.read().
697
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000698- Patches #893642, #1039083: add allow_none, encoding arguments to constructors of
Andrew M. Kuchling10a16de2005-12-04 16:34:40 +0000699 SimpleXMLRPCServer and CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler.
700
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000701- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
702
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000703- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
704
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000705- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
706
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000707- Enhancements to the csv module:
708
709 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000710 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000711 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000712 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
713 reporting.
714 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
715 dictates.
716 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000717 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000718 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000719 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
720 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000721 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
722 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000723 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000724 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
725 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
726 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
727 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
728 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
729 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
730 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
731 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
732 without first creating a dialect class.
733 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
734 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
735 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000736 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000737 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
738 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000739 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
740 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
741 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
742 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000743 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
744 This has been fixed.
745
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000746- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
747 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
748 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
749 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
750
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000751- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
752
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000753- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
754 (Bug #951915).
755
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000756- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
757 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
758 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000759 encoding alias table.
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000760
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000761- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
762
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000763- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
764 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
765
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000766- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
767
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000768- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
769
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000770- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
771
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000772- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
773
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000774- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
775
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000776- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
777 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
778 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
779
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000780- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000781 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000782
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000783- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
784 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
785 tokenizer with very long source lines.
786
Barry Warsaw538561e2006-01-01 21:48:54 +0000787- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called
788 immediately after creating the object, without any intervening
789 ``.decompress()`` calls.
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000790
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000791- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
792 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000793
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000794- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
795 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
796
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000797- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
798 correctly.
799
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000800- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
801 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
802 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
803 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
804 between two lines.
805
Walter Dörwalda47d1c02005-08-30 10:23:14 +0000806- Bug #1251300: On UCS-4 builds the "unicode-internal" codec will now complain
807 about illegal code points. The codec now supports PEP 293 style error
808 handlers.
809
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000810- Bug #1235646: ``codecs.StreamRecoder.next()`` now reencodes the data it reads
Walter Dörwaldc5238b82005-09-01 11:56:53 +0000811 from the input stream, so that the output is a byte string in the correct
812 encoding instead of a unicode string.
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000813
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000814- Bug #1202493: Fixing SRE parser to handle '{}' as perl does, rather than
815 considering it exactly like a '*'.
816
Walter Dörwald007f8df2005-10-09 19:42:27 +0000817- Bug #1245379: Add "unicode-1-1-utf-7" as an alias for "utf-7" to
818 ``encodings.aliases``.
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000819
Walter Dörwald09f0dd52005-11-21 19:10:07 +0000820- ` uu.encode()`` and ``uu.decode()`` now support unicode filenames.
821
Gustavo Niemeyer548148812006-01-31 18:34:13 +0000822- Patch #1413711: Certain patterns of differences were making difflib
823 touch the recursion limit.
824
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000825Build
826-----
827
Martin v. Löwis86d66262006-02-17 08:40:11 +0000828- Patch #1432345: Make python compile on DragonFly.
829
Martin v. Löwis856bf9a2006-02-14 20:42:55 +0000830- Build support for Win64-AMD64 was added.
831
Martin v. Löwisa55e55e2006-02-11 15:55:14 +0000832- Patch #1428494: Prefer linking against ncursesw over ncurses library.
833
Martin v. Löwisfd9a72a2006-01-08 10:07:33 +0000834- Patch #881820: look for openpty and forkpty also in libbsd.
835
Martin v. Löwis64c33dd2006-01-03 07:42:14 +0000836- The sources of zlib are now part of the Python distribution (zlib 1.2.3).
837 The zlib module is now builtin on Windows.
838
Martin v. Löwisd5845ec2005-12-30 12:31:38 +0000839- Use -xcode=pic32 for CCSHARED on Solaris with SunPro.
840
Martin v. Löwis147fbe52005-08-07 21:09:30 +0000841- Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
842 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
843
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000844- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
845 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
846
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000847- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
848 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
849 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000850 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000851
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000852- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
853 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
854 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
855
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000856- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
857
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000858- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
859 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
860
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000861- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
862 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
863 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
864 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
865 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
866 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
867 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
868 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
869
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000870- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
871 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
872 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
873 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
874
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000875C API
876-----
877
Raymond Hettingerbeb31012005-08-16 03:47:52 +0000878- Added a C API for set and frozenset objects.
879
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000880- Removed PyRange_New().
881
Walter Dörwaldd1c1e102005-10-06 20:29:57 +0000882- Patch #1313939: PyUnicode_DecodeCharmap() accepts a unicode string as the
883 mapping argument now. This string is used as a mapping table. Byte values
884 greater than the length of the string and 0xFFFE are treated as undefined
885 mappings.
886
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000887
888Tests
889-----
890
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000891- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000892
Hye-Shik Changaaa2f1d2005-12-10 17:44:27 +0000893- Patch #1276356: New resource "urlfetch" is implemented. This enables
894 even impatient people to run tests that require remote files.
895
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000896
897Documentation
898-------------
899
Georg Brandl8cb30772006-01-20 09:34:29 +0000900- Bug #1402224: Add warning to dl docs about crashes.
901
Georg Brandla3a93ae2006-01-20 09:14:36 +0000902- Bug #1396471: Document that Windows' ftell() can return invalid
903 values for text files with UNIX-style line endings.
904
Georg Brandl32252422005-09-14 20:42:00 +0000905- Bug #1274828: Document os.path.splitunc().
906
Georg Brandl79c122f2005-08-24 07:31:33 +0000907- Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py.
908
Georg Brandl6f2bbd32005-08-24 07:26:55 +0000909- Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation.
910
Georg Brandlf13c4ba2005-08-02 10:28:08 +0000911- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
912
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000913- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
914
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000915- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
916
917- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
918
919- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
920
921- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
922
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000923- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
924 Closes bug #1166582.
925
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000926- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
927 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
928 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
929
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000930Mac
931---
932
933
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000934New platforms
935-------------
936
937- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
938
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000939
940Tools/Demos
941-----------
942
Brett Cannonacde7342006-03-01 04:28:00 +0000943- Created Misc/Vim/vim_syntax.py to auto-generate a python.vim file in that
944 directory for syntax highlighting in Vim. Vim directory was added and placed
945 vimrc to it (was previous up a level).
946
Georg Brandl56897312005-08-24 18:32:30 +0000947- Added two new files to Tools/scripts: pysource.py, which recursively
948 finds Python source files, and findnocoding.py, which finds Python
949 source files that need an encoding declaration.
950 Patch #784089, credits to Oleg Broytmann.
951
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000952- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
953
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000954- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000955
Barry Warsaw538561e2006-01-01 21:48:54 +0000956- Fixed a display glitch in Pynche, which could cause the right arrow to
957 wiggle over by a pixel.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000958
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000959What's New in Python 2.4 final?
960===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000961
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000962*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000963
964Core and builtins
965-----------------
966
967- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
968 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
969 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
970
971
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000972What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
973==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000974
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000975*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000976
977Core and builtins
978-----------------
979
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000980- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
981 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
982 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
983
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000984
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000985Library
986-------
987
988- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
989 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
990 raised is re-raised.
991
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000992- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
993 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
994
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000995- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
996 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
997 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
998 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
999 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
1000 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
1001 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
1002 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
1003 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
1004 by the slice are recomputed now.
1005
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +00001006- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +00001007
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00001008Build
1009-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +00001010
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +00001011- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
1012 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
1013 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00001014
1015C API
1016-----
1017
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +00001018- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
1019
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00001020
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001021What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
1022================================
1023
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +00001024*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001025
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +00001026License
1027-------
1028
1029The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
1030is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
1031changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
1032Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
1033intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
1034durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
1035the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
1036License::
1037
1038 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
1039
1040says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
1041to Python 2.1.1.
1042
1043The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
1044License Version 2.
1045
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001046Core and builtins
1047-----------------
1048
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +00001049- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
1050 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
1051 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
1052 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
1053 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
1054 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
1055 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
Andrew M. Kuchlingb2a739d2005-11-22 15:14:44 +00001056 ``AttributeError`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +00001057 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
1058 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
1059
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +00001060- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001061
1062Extension Modules
1063-----------------
1064
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +00001065- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
1066 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
1067 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
1068 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001069
1070Library
1071-------
1072
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +00001073- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
1074 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
1075 returned.
1076
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +00001077- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
1078
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +00001079- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
1080 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
1081
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +00001082- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
1083
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +00001084- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
1085 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001086
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +00001087- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
1088
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +00001089- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
1090
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +00001091- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +00001092 the source code is updated and reloaded.
1093
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001094Build
1095-----
1096
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +00001097- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001098
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001099What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
1100================================
1101
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +00001102*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001103
1104Core and builtins
1105-----------------
1106
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +00001107- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +00001108 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
1109
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +00001110- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
1111 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
1112 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
1113 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
1114
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +00001115- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
1116 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
1117
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +00001118- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
1119 constant.
1120
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +00001121- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
1122 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
1123 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
1124 large), and to anomalies such as
1125 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
1126 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
1127 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
1128 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001129
1130Extension modules
1131-----------------
1132
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +00001133- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
1134 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +00001135 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
1136 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
1137 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001138
1139Library
1140-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +00001141
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +00001142- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +00001143 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +00001144 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
1145 --swig-cpp.
1146
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +00001147- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
1148 it is set.
1149
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +00001150- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +00001151
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +00001152- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
1153 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
1154 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
1155 Closes bug #1039270.
1156
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +00001157- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +00001158
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +00001159 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +00001160 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
1161 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
1162 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
1163 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
1164 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
1165 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
1166 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
1167 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
1168 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
1169 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
1170 + Updates to documentation.
1171
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +00001172- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
1173 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
1174 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
1175 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
1176
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +00001177- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001178
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +00001179- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
1180 applications should use the getmember function.
1181
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +00001182- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
1183
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +00001184- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
1185 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
1186 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
1187 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
1188 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
1189 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
1190 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
1191 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
1192 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
1193
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001194- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
1195 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +00001196 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001197
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +00001198- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
1199 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
1200 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
1201 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
1202 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
1203 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
1204 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
1205 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001206
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +00001207- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
1208 the new public features (of which there are many).
1209
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +00001210- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001211 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
1212 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
1213 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
1214 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +00001215 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001216
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +00001217- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
1218
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +00001219- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
1220 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
1221 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
1222 options.
1223
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +00001224- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
1225 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
1226 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
1227 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
1228 conditions under which non-string values work.
1229
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001230Build
1231-----
1232
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +00001233- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
1234 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
1235 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
1236
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +00001237- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
1238 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
1239 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
1240 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
1241 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001242
1243C API
1244-----
1245
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +00001246- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
1247 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
1248
1249- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
1250
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +00001251- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
1252 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
1253 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
1254 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
1255 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
1256 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
1257 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
1258 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
1259 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
1260
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +00001261- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
1262
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +00001263- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
1264 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
1265 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001266
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001267Tests
1268-----
1269
1270- test__locale ported to unittest
1271
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001272Mac
1273---
1274
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +00001275- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
1276 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
1277 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001278
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001279Tools/Demos
1280-----------
1281
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +00001282- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
1283 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
1284 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
1285 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
1286 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001287
1288
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001289What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
1290=================================
1291
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +00001292*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001293
1294Core and builtins
1295-----------------
1296
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001297- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001298 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
1299
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001300- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
1301 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
1302 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
1303 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
1304 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
1305 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
1306 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
1307 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001308 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
1309 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
1310 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
1311 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
1312 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001313
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +00001314- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
1315 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
1316 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
1317 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
1318 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
1319
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +00001320- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
1321
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +00001322- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
1323 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
1324
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +00001325- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
1326 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
1327 modified the list.
1328
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +00001329- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
1330 functions is now writable.
1331
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +00001332- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
1333 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
1334 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
1335 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
1336
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001337- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
1338 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
1339 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
1340 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
1341 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +00001342
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +00001343- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
1344 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
1345
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001346Extension modules
1347-----------------
1348
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001349- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
1350
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +00001351- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
1352 data.
1353
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001354- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
1355 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
1356 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
1357 supposed to have been truncated away.
1358
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +00001359- Added socket.socketpair().
1360
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +00001361- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
1362 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
1363
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001364- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +00001365 versions of Python, have now been removed.
1366
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001367Library
1368-------
1369
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001370- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001371 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001372
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +00001373- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
1374 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
1375
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +00001376- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
1377 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
1378
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001379- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
1380
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +00001381- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
1382 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +00001383
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +00001384- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
1385 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
1386
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +00001387- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
1388
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +00001389- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
1390
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +00001391- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
1392
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +00001393- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
1394 Percivall.
1395
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +00001396- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
1397 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
1398
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001399- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
1400 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
1401 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001402 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001403
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001404- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
1405 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
1406 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
1407 and exponent.
1408
1409- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
1410
1411- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +00001412 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001413 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
1414
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001415- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
1416 to the readline module.
1417
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001418- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001419 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
1420 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001421
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +00001422- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
1423 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
1424 contains symlinks.
1425
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +00001426- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
1427 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
1428
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +00001429- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
1430 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
1431 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1432
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001433- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
1434 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
1435 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
1436 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
1437 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
1438 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
1439 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
1440 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
1441 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
1442 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
1443 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
1444 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
1445 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
1446
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +00001447- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
1448
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001449Tools/Demos
1450-----------
1451
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001452- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
1453 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
1454
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +00001455- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
1456
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001457Build
1458-----
1459
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001460- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
1461 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
1462 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
1463 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
1464 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
1465 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
1466 plans to do so.
1467
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +00001468- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
1469 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
1470
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +00001471- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
1472 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
1473
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001474- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
1475 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
1476
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +00001477- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
1478 GNU/k*BSD systems.
1479
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +00001480- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
1481 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
1482
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001483C API
1484-----
1485
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001486..
1487
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001488Documentation
1489-------------
1490
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001491- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1492 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1493
1494- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1495 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1496 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001497
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001498New platforms
1499-------------
1500
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001501- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1502
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001503Tests
1504-----
1505
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001506..
1507
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001508Windows
1509-------
1510
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001511- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1512 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1513 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1514 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1515 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1516 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1517 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1518 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1519 the problem.
1520
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001521Mac
1522---
1523
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001524..
1525
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001526
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001527What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1528=================================
1529
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001530*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001531
1532Core and builtins
1533-----------------
1534
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001535- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1536 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1537 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1538 sensitive code.
1539
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001540- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001541 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001542
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001543 @staticmethod
1544 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001545
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001546 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001547
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001548- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1549 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1550 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1551 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1552 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1553 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1554 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1555 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1556 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1557 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1558 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1559
1560 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1561 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1562 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1563 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1564 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1565 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1566 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1567
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001568- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1569 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1570
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001571- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001572 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001573
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001574- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001575 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001576 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1577
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001578- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001579 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1580 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1581
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001582- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1583 types that support garbage collection.
1584
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001585- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1586
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001587- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1588 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1589 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1590 Jython.
1591
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001592- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1593
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001594- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1595 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1596
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001597- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1598 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1599 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001600
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001601- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1602 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1603 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1604
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001605Extension modules
1606-----------------
1607
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001608- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1609
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001610Library
1611-------
1612
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001613- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1614 TIS-620
1615
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001616- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1617 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1618 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1619 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1620 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1621 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1622 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1623 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1624 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1625 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1626
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001627- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1628
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001629- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1630 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1631 same as when the argument is omitted).
1632 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1633
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001634- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1635
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001636- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1637 schemes are offered.
1638
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001639- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1640
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001641- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1642 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1643 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1644
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001645- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1646
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001647- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1648 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1649
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001650- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1651 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1652 when dummy_threading is being used.
1653
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001654- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1655 from a tarfile.
1656
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001657- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001658 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001659
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001660- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1661 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1662 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1663 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1664
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001665- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1666 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1667
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001668- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1669 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1670 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1671 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1672 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1673 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1674 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1675 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1676 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1677 by some other method in progress).
1678
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001679- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1680 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1681 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001682
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001683- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1684
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001685- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1686 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1687 AM Kuchling.
1688
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001689- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1690 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1691 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1692
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001693- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1694 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1695 instead of unsigned.
1696
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001697- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001698 no longer part of the public API.
1699
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001700- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1701 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1702 string methods of the same name).
1703
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001704- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001705 SF patch 945642.
1706
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001707- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1708
1709 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1710
1711 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1712 DocTestSuites.
1713
1714- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1715 that provide thread-local data.
1716
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001717- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1718 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1719
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001720- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1721
1722- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1723 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1724 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1725
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001726- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1727
1728 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1729 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1730 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001731
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001732 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1733 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1734 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1735 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1736
1737 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1738 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1739
1740 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1741 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1742 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1743 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1744
1745 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1746 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1747 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1748 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1749 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1750
1751 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1752 wrapping help output.
1753
1754 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1755 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1756 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001757
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001758C API
1759-----
1760
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001761- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1762 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1763 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1764 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1765 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1766 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1767 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1768 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1769 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1770 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1771 its visible semantics have not changed.
1772
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001773- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1774 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1775
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001776Documentation
1777-------------
1778
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001779- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001780
1781 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001782 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001783
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001784 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001785
1786 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1787
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001788- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001789
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001790Tests
1791-----
1792
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001793- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001794 platforms that use the Makefile.
1795
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001796- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1797 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1798 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1799
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001800
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001801What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1802=================================
1803
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001804*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001805
1806Core and builtins
1807-----------------
1808
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001809- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1810 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1811 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1812 objects now (one object instead of three).
1813
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001814- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1815 Windows DLLs.
1816
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001817- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1818 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001819
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001820- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1821 a new .pyc magic.
1822
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001823- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1824 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1825 be there.
1826
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001827- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1828 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1829 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1830
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001831- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1832 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1833 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1834
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001835- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1836
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001837- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1838 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1839 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001840
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001841- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1842 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1843
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001844- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1845
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001846- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001847 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001848
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001849- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1850
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001851- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1852
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001853- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1854 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1855
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001856- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1857 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1858 Fixes bug #858016 .
1859
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001860- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1861 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1862 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1863
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001864- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1865 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1866 improves their performance (about 35%).
1867
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001868- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1869 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1870 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1871
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001872- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1873 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1874 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1875 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1876
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001877- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1878 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001879 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001880 length is not known).
1881
1882- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1883 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001884 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1885 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001886 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1887
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001888- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1889 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1890
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001891- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1892 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1893 keyword arguments.
1894
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001895- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1896 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1897 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1898
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001899- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1900 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1901 cases.
1902
1903- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1904 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1905 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1906 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1907 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1908 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1909 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1910 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1911 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1912 a release build.
1913
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001914- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1915 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1916
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001917- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001918 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001919
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001920- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1921 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1922 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1923 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1924 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1925 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1926 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1927 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1928 destroyed.
1929
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001930- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1931 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1932 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1933 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1934 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1935 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1936 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1937 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1938
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001939- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1940 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1941 character other than a space.
1942
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001943- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1944 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1945 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1946 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1947 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1948 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1949 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1950 attributes with the same name.
1951
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001952- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1953 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1954 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1955 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1956 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1957 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1958 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1959 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1960 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1961 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1962 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1963 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1964 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1965 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001966
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001967- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1968 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1969 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1970 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1971 This has been repaired.
1972
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001973- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1974
1975- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1976
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001977- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1978 over a sequence.
1979
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001980- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001981 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001982
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001983- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1984
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001985- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1986 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1987 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1988 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1989 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1990 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1991 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1992 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1993
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001994- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1995 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1996 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1997
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001998- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1999 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
2000 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
2001 freelist.
2002
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00002003- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
2004 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
2005
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00002006- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
2007 number.
2008
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00002009- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
2010 a TypeError exception.
2011
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00002012- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
2013 820195.
2014
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00002015- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
2016 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
2017 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
2018
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002019- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00002020 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
2021 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00002022
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00002023- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
2024 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
2025 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
2026
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00002027- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
2028 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00002029 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00002030
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00002031- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00002032 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
2033 the first call.
2034
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00002035
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002036Extension modules
2037-----------------
2038
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00002039- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
2040 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
2041
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00002042- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
2043 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
2044 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
2045 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
2046 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
2047 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
2048 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00002049
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00002050- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
2051
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00002052- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
2053
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00002054- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
2055 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
2056
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00002057- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
2058 fewer false positives.
2059
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00002060- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
2061 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
2062
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002063- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00002064 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
2065
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00002066- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002067 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00002068 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00002069 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
2070 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00002071
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00002072- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
2073 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
2074 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
2075 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
2076
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00002077- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
2078 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
2079 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
2080 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
2081 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
2082 #897625.
2083
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00002084- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
2085 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
2086
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00002087- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
2088 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
2089 and pops on either side of the deque.
2090
2091- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
2092 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
2093
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00002094- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
2095 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
2096 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
2097 other functions that expect a function argument.
2098
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00002099- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
2100
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00002101- os.getsid was added.
2102
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00002103- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
2104 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
2105 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
2106
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00002107- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
2108
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00002109- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
2110
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00002111- readline.clear_history was added.
2112
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00002113- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
2114
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00002115- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
2116
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00002117- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
2118
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00002119- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
2120
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00002121- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
2122
2123- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
2124
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00002125- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
2126
2127- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
2128
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00002129- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
2130 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
2131 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
2132
2133- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
2134 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
2135 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
2136 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
2137 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
2138 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
2139 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
2140
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00002141- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
2142 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
2143 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
2144 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00002145
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002146- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00002147 iterators from a single iterable.
2148
2149- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
2150 of raising a TypeError exception.
2151
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00002152- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
2153 as parameter.
2154
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002155Library
2156-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00002157
Armin Rigoa871ef22006-02-08 12:53:56 +00002158- Added a new module: cProfile, a C profiler with the same interface as the
2159 profile module. cProfile avoids some of the drawbacks of the hotshot
2160 profiler and provides a bit more information than the other two profilers.
2161 Based on "lsprof" (patch #1212837).
2162
Georg Brandlf0de6a12005-08-22 18:02:59 +00002163- Bug #1266283: The new function "lexists" is now in os.path.__all__.
2164
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00002165- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
2166 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
2167 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002168
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00002169- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
2170 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
2171 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00002172
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00002173- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00002174
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00002175- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
2176 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00002177
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00002178- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
2179 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
2180
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00002181- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
2182
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00002183- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00002184 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00002185
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002186- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00002187 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002188
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00002189- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
2190
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00002191- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
2192 on cygwin and mingw32.
2193
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00002194- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
2195
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00002196- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
2197 module.
2198
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00002199- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
2200 installation scheme for all platforms.
2201
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00002202- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00002203 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00002204
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00002205- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
2206 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
2207 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
2208
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00002209- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
2210 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
2211 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
2212
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00002213- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
2214
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00002215- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
2216
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00002217- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
2218 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
2219
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00002220- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
2221 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
2222 type pattern with the same value exists.
2223
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00002224- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
2225 when run from the command prompt).
2226
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00002227- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
2228 not taken into consideration when caching value.
2229
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00002230- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
2231 default sort).
2232
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00002233- Added global runctx function to profile module
2234
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00002235- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
2236
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00002237- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
2238
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00002239- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
2240
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002241- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00002242 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
2243 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
2244 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
2245 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
2246 accordingly.
2247
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00002248- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
2249 decoding standards.
2250
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00002251- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
2252 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
2253 called for all requests.
2254
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00002255- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
2256 they are passed to the compiler.
2257
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00002258- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
2259 indent, width and depth.
2260
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00002261- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
2262 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
2263
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00002264- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
2265 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
2266
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00002267- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
2268
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00002269- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
2270
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00002271- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
2272
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00002273- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
2274 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
2275
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00002276- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00002277 for better performance.
2278
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002279- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00002280
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00002281- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
2282 a string).
2283
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00002284- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
2285
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00002286- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
2287
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00002288- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
2289
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00002290- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
2291
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00002292- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
2293 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
2294 list of fieldnames.
2295
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00002296- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
2297 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
2298
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00002299- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
2300
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00002301- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
2302 empty lists.
2303
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00002304- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
2305 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
2306 and shelves.
2307
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00002308- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
2309 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
2310
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002311- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00002312 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
2313 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002314
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00002315- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
2316 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00002317 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00002318
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002319- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00002320 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
2321 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
2322
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002323- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
2324 and removed in Py2.4.
2325
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00002326- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
2327
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00002328- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
2329
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002330Tools/Demos
2331-----------
2332
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00002333- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
2334 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
2335
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00002336- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
2337
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00002338- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
2339 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
2340 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
2341 destination in situations where both files are given.
2342
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00002343- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
2344 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
2345 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
2346 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
2347
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00002348- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
2349
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00002350- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
2351 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
2352 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
2353 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
2354 now.
2355
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002356- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
2357 in effect
2358
2359- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
2360 C-c C-h
2361
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00002362- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
2363 -d option was given.
2364
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002365Build
2366-----
2367
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00002368- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
2369 build under OS X.
2370
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00002371- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
2372 --enable-profiling.
2373
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00002374- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
2375 is configured --with-tsc.
2376
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00002377- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
2378 on AMD64.
2379
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00002380- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
2381 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
2382
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00002383- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
2384 removed.
2385
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00002386- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
2387 supported (see PEP 11).
2388
2389- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
2390
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00002391- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
2392
2393- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
2394 (see PEP 11).
2395
2396- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
2397 sizeof(char) must be 1.
2398
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002399C API
2400-----
2401
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00002402- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
2403 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
2404 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
2405
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00002406- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
2407 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
2408 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
2409 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
2410
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00002411- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
2412 generator objects.
2413
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002414- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
2415 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00002416 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
2417 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002418
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00002419- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
2420 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
2421
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00002422- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
2423 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
2424 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
2425 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
2426 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
2427
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00002428- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
2429 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
2430 about 10% faster.
2431
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00002432- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
2433 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
2434
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00002435- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
2436 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
2437 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
2438 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
2439
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002440Windows
2441-------
2442
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00002443- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
2444 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
2445 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
2446 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
2447
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00002448- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
2449 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
2450 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
2451
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002452
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002453What's New in Python 2.3 final?
2454===============================
2455
2456*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
2457
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002458IDLE
2459----
2460
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00002461- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
2462 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
2463 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
2464 context-menu actions.
2465
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002466- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
2467 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
2468 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
2469 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
2470 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
2471 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
2472 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
2473 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
2474 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
2475
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002476
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002477What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
2478=============================================
2479
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00002480*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002481
2482Core and builtins
2483-----------------
2484
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002485- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002486 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002487 comment at the end are still unsupported.
2488
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002489Extension modules
2490-----------------
2491
2492- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
2493 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
2494 than once. This has been fixed.
2495
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002496- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2497 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2498 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2499 call.
2500
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002501- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2502
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002503Library
2504-------
2505
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002506- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2507 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2508
2509- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2510 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2511 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2512 restored.
2513
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002514IDLE
2515----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002516
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002517- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002518
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002519Build
2520-----
2521
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002522- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2523 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2524
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002525C API
2526-----
2527
2528Windows
2529-------
2530
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002531- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2532 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2533
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002534- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2535
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002536Mac
2537---
2538
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002539- Various fixes to pimp.
2540
2541- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2542
2543- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2544 more problems than it solves.
2545
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002546
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002547What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2548=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002549
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002550*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2551
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002552Core and builtins
2553-----------------
2554
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002555- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2556 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2557
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002558- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2559 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002560 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002561
2562- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2563 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2564 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002565 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002566
2567- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2568 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002569
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002570- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2571 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2572 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2573
2574- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002575 770247.
2576
2577- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002578
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002579Extension modules
2580-----------------
2581
2582- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2583 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2584
2585- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2586
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002587- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2588
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002589- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2590 contained within the _strptime module.
2591
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002592- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2593 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2594
2595- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002596 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2597
2598- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2599 the find_class attribute, if present.
2600
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002601- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002602
2603 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2604 (SF bug 763298).
2605
2606 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002607 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2608 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2609 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002610
2611 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2612
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002613Library
2614-------
2615
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002616- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2617
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002618- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2619 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2620 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2621 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2622 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2623 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2624 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2625 or Tester().
2626
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002627- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2628 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2629 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2630 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2631 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2632 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2633 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2634 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2635 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002636
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002637 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002638
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002639- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2640 weren't before was an oversight.
2641
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002642- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2643 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2644
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002645- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2646 when there are no lines.
2647
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002648- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2649 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2650
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002651- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2652 to child processes.
2653
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002654- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2655
2656- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2657
2658- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2659 xmlrpclib.
2660
2661- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2662 responses.
2663
2664- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2665 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2666
2667- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2668 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2669 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2670
2671- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2672 used as patterns.
2673
2674- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2675 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2676 than Tk 8.3.
2677
2678- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2679
2680- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002681
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002682Tools/Demos
2683-----------
2684
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002685- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2686
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002687- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2688
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002689- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002690
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002691Build
2692-----
2693
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002694- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2695
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002696- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2697
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002698- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2699 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002700
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002701- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2702 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2703 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002704
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002705C API
2706-----
2707
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002708- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2709 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2710
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002711Windows
2712-------
2713
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002714- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2715 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2716 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2717 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2718 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2719 Python exception ::
2720
2721 thread.error: can't start new thread
2722
2723 is raised now.
2724
2725- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2726 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2727 instead of from DLL teardown.
2728
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002729Mac
2730---
2731
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002732- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002733 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002734 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2735 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2736 the executable in the bundle.
2737
2738- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002739
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002740- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2741
2742- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2743 on Panther.
2744
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002745What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2746================================
2747
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002748*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002749
2750Core and builtins
2751-----------------
2752
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002753- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2754 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2755 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2756 with the -i option.
2757
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002758- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2759 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2760
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002761- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2762 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2763
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002764- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2765 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2766 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2767 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2768 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2769 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2770 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2771 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2772 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2773 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2774 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2775 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2776 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002777
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002778- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2779 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2780 embedded in a lambda expression.
2781
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002782- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2783 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2784 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2785 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2786 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2787
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002788- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2789 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2790 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2791
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002792- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2793 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2794
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002795- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2796 It's writable again.
2797
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002798- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2799 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2800 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002801 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002802
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002803- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2804 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2805 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2806
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002807Extension modules
2808-----------------
2809
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002810- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2811 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2812
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002813- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2814 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2815 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2816 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2817
2818- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2819 collection.
2820
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002821- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2822 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2823 unique within a single program run.
2824
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002825- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2826 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2827
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002828- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2829 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2830
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002831- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2832 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002833
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002834- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2835
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002836- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2837 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2838
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002839- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2840 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2841 for many BSD-derived systems.
2842
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002843
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002844Library
2845-------
2846
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002847- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2848 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2849 primary ones:
2850
2851 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2852 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2853 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2854
2855 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2856 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2857 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2858 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2859 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2860 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2861
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002862- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2863 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2864 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2865 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2866 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2867 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2868 argument.
2869
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002870- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2871 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2872 in the archive.
2873
2874- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2875 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2876
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002877- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2878 569574).
2879
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002880- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2881 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2882 no more.
2883
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002884- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2885 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2886 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2887 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2888 code coverage.
2889
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002890- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2891 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2892 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002893 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2894 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002895
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002896- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2897 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2898 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002899 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002900
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002901- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2902
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002903- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2904 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2905 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2906 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2907
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002908- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2909 handling.
2910
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002911- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2912 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2913
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002914- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2915 in socket.py.
2916
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002917- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2918
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002919- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2920 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2921 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2922 opener with proxy support.
2923
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002924- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2925
2926- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2927
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002928Tools/Demos
2929-----------
2930
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002931- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2932
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002933- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2934
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002935- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2936 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002937
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002938- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2939 files.
2940
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002941Build
2942-----
2943
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002944- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002945 different root directory.
2946
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002947C API
2948-----
2949
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002950- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2951 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2952 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2953 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2954 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2955 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2956 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2957 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2958 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2959 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2960
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002961- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2962 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2963 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2964 from Python.
2965
2966
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002967New platforms
2968-------------
2969
2970None this time.
2971
2972Tests
2973-----
2974
2975- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2976 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2977
2978Windows
2979-------
2980
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002981- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2982
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002983- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2984 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2985 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2986 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2987 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2988 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2989 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2990 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2991 that's what it's for.
2992
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002993Mac
2994---
2995
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002996- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2997 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2998 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2999 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00003000- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
3001 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
3002- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00003003
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00003004SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
3005------------------------------------
3006
3007430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
3008598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
3009622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
3010661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
3011683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
3012697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
3013713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
3014724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
3015727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
3016729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
3017730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
3018731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
3019732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
3020733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
3021735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
3022740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
3023744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
3024745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
3025747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
3026749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
3027751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
3028753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
3029755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
3030757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
3031760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
3032
3033
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003034What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
3035================================
3036
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00003037*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003038
3039Core and builtins
3040-----------------
3041
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00003042- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
3043 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
3044
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00003045- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
3046 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
3047 and cannot be strings).
3048
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00003049- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
3050 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
3051 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
3052 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
3053
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00003054- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
3055 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
3056 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
3057 Python itself.
3058
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00003059- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
3060 the referenced object, if it has one.
3061
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00003062- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
3063 the thread started at
3064 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
3065
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00003066- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
3067 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
3068 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
3069 placed on a list index.
3070
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00003071- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
3072 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
3073 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
3074 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
3075
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003076- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
3077 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
3078 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
3079 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
3080 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
3081 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
3082 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
3083
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00003084- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
3085 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
3086 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
3087 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
3088 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
3089
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00003090- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
3091 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00003092
3093- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
3094 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
3095 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
3096 #693195.)
3097
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00003098- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
3099 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003100
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00003101- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00003102 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00003103 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
3104 interpreter executions, would fail.
3105
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00003106- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00003107 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00003108 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00003109
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003110Extension modules
3111-----------------
3112
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00003113- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
3114 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
3115 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
3116 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
3117
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00003118- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
3119 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
3120
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00003121- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
3122 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
3123 and Greg Chapman.)
3124
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00003125- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
3126 recursively.
3127
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00003128- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00003129 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
3130 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
3131 leaks.
3132
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00003133- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
3134
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00003135- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
3136 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
3137 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
3138 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
3139 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
3140 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
3141 #705836.
3142
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00003143- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00003144 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
3145
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00003146- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
3147 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
3148 See SF bug #692416.
3149
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00003150- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
3151 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
3152
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00003153- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
3154 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
3155 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003156
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00003157- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00003158 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
3159 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
3160
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00003161- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
3162 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
3163 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
3164 timeouts to work properly.
3165
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003166Library
3167-------
3168
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00003169- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
3170 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
3171 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
3172 future release.
3173
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00003174- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
3175 for querying platform dependent features.
3176
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00003177- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00003178
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00003179- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
3180 pickle protocol versions.
3181
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00003182- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
3183 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
3184 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
3185
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00003186- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
3187
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00003188- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
3189 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
3190 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
3191 modules.
3192
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00003193- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
3194 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
3195 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
3196
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00003197- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
3198 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
3199
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00003200- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
3201 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
3202 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
3203
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003204- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00003205 MS Office extensions.
3206
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00003207- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
3208 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
3209
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00003210- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
3211 execution speed of expressions and statements.
3212
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003213- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
3214 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
3215 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
3216 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
3217 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
3218 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
3219
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00003220- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
3221 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
3222 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003223
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00003224- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
3225 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
3226 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
3227
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00003228- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
3229
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00003230- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
3231 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
3232 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
3233
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003234Tools/Demos
3235-----------
3236
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00003237- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
3238 See the module docstring for details.
3239
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003240Build
3241-----
3242
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00003243- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
3244 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003245
3246C API
3247-----
3248
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003249- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
3250
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00003251- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
3252 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
3253 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
3254
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003255- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
3256 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00003257
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003258 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
3259 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
3260 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00003261
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00003262- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00003263 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
3264
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00003265- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
3266 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
3267 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003268
3269New platforms
3270-------------
3271
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00003272None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003273
3274Tests
3275-----
3276
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00003277- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
3278 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003279
3280Windows
3281-------
3282
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00003283- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
3284 function.
3285
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00003286- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
3287 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003288
3289Mac
3290---
3291
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00003292- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
3293 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00003294
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00003295- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
3296 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003297
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00003298- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
3299 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
3300 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003301
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003302- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00003303 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
3304 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003305
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003306- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
3307 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003308
3309
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003310What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
3311=================================
3312
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003313*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003314
3315Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003316-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003317
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00003318- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
3319 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
3320 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
3321
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00003322- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
3323 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
3324 (SF patch #664376.)
3325
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003326- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
3327 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
3328 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
3329 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
3330 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
3331 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00003332 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003333
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003334- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
3335 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
3336 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
3337 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003338 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003339
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00003340- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
3341 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
3342 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
3343 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
3344 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
3345 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
3346 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
3347 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
3348 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
3349 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
3350 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
3351
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00003352- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
3353 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
3354 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
3355 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
3356 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
3357 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
3358
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00003359- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
3360 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
3361
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00003362- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
3363 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
3364 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
3365 case.)
3366
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00003367- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
3368 passed as unicode strings.
3369
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00003370- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
3371 See SF bug #683467.
3372
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00003373- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
3374 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
3375
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00003376- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
3377
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00003378- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
3379
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00003380- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
3381 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
3382 arguments.
3383
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00003384- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
3385 See SF bug #667147.
3386
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003387- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003388 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003389 See SF bug #676155.
3390
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003391- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003392 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003393 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
3394 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
3395 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
3396 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
3397 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
3398 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003399
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003400Extension modules
3401-----------------
3402
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003403- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
3404 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3405 tp_as_number pointer.
3406
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003407- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
3408 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
3409 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
3410 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
3411 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
3412
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003413- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
3414
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00003415- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
3416
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003417- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00003418 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003419 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
3420 patch #678531.)
3421
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00003422- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
3423 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
3424
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00003425- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
3426 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
3427
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00003428- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
3429
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00003430- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
3431 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
3432 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
3433
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003434- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
3435
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003436- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
3437 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
3438
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003439- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003440
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003441- datetime changes:
3442
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00003443 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
3444
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003445 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
3446 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
3447 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
3448 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
3449 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
3450 now.
3451
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003452 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003453 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
3454 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003455
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003456 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003457 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003458 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
3459 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
3460 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
3461 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003462
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003463 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
3464 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
3465 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003466 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
3467
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003468 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
3469 by a later example coded by Guido.
3470
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003471 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003472 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
3473 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
3474 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003475 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
3476 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
3477
3478 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
3479 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
3480 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
3481 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
3482 tzinfo subclass instance.
3483
3484 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
3485 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
3486 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
3487 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
3488 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
3489 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
3490 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
3491 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003492
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003493 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
3494 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3495 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3496 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3497 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003498 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3499
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003500 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003501
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003502 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3503 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3504 as a naive datetime object.
3505
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003506 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3507 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3508 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3509
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003510 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3511 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3512 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3513 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3514 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3515 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3516 comparison.
3517
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003518 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3519 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3520 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3521 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003522 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003523
3524 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003525
3526 and ::
3527
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003528 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3529
3530 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3531 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3532 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3533 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3534
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003535 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3536 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3537 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3538 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3539 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3540
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003541 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3542 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003543 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3544 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003545
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003546Library
3547-------
3548
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003549- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3550 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3551
3552- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3553 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3554 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3555 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3556 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3557 See PEP 307 for details.
3558
3559- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3560 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3561
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003562- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3563 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003564 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003565 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3566 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003567 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003568
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003569- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3570 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3571
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003572- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3573 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3574 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3575
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003576- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3577
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003578- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3579 exception.
3580
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003581- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3582 class.
3583
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003584- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3585 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3586 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3587
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003588- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3589 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3590
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003591- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003592 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3593 See SF bug #659228.
3594
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003595- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3596 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3597 See SF patch #651082.
3598
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003599- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003600
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003601- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3602 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3603
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003604- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003605 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003606
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003607- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3608 DOS paths from other platforms.
3609
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003610Tools/Demos
3611-----------
3612
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003613- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3614 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3615 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3616 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3617 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3618 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3619 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3620 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3621 example:
3622
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003623 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3624 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003625
3626 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3627
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003628
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003629Build
3630-----
3631
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003632- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3633 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3634 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003635 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3636
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003637 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3638
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003639- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3640 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3641 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3642 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3643 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3644 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3645 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3646 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3647 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3648
3649- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3650 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3651 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3652 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3653
3654- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3655 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3656
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003657C API
3658-----
3659
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003660- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3661 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003662
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003663- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3664 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3665 tp_as_number pointer.
3666
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003667- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3668 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3669 (SF #681367)
3670
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003671- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3672 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3673 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3674 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003675
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003676Tests
3677-----
3678
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003679- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003680 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3681 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3682 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3683 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3684 pydoc.)
3685
3686- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3687
3688- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003689
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003690Windows
3691-------
3692
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003693- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3694 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3695 time).
3696
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003697- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3698 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3699
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003700- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3701 release without strong cryptography.
3702
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003703- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003704 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003705
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003706- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3707 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3708
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003709Mac
3710---
3711
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003712- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3713 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003714
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003715- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3716 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3717 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003718
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003719- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3720 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003721
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003722- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3723 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3724 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3725 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003726
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003727- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003728 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3729 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3730 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003731
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003732
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003733What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003734=================================
3735
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003736*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003737
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003738Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003739--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003740
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003741- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3742
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003743- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3744 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003745 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003746 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003747 a different meaning than before.
3748
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003749- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003750 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003751 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003752
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003753- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003754 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003755 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003756
3757- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3758 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3759 and deallocation.
3760
3761- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3762 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3763
3764- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3765 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3766 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3767 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3768 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3769
3770- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3771 now detected by the garbage collector.
3772
3773- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3774 [SF bug 519621]
3775
3776- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3777 identifier.
3778
3779- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3780 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3781 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3782 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3783 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3784 [SF bug 563060]
3785
3786- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3787 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3788 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3789 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3790 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3791
3792- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3793 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3794 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3795
3796- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3797
3798- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3799 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3800 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3801 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3802 state of the slots would be lost.)
3803
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003804Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003805-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003806
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003807- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003808 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3809 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3810 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3811 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003812 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3813 Jython 2.1.
3814
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003815- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003816 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003817 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3818 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3819 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3820 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3821 these, see PEP 302.
3822
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003823- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3824 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3825 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3826
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003827- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3828 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3829 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3830
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003831- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3832 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3833 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3834
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003835- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3836 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3837 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3838 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3839 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3840 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3841 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3842 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3843 releases or implementations.
3844
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003845- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003846 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3847 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003848
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003849- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3850 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3851
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003852- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3853 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3854 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3855
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003856- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3857 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3858
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003859- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3860 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003861 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3862 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003863
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003864- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3865 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3866 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3867 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3868 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3869
3870 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3871 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3872 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3873 pattern.
3874
3875 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3876 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3877 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3878 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3879
3880 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3881 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3882 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3883 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3884 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3885 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3886
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003887- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3888 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3889 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3890 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3891 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3892 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3893 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3894 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003895
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003896- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3897 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3898 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3899 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3900 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003901 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3902 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3903 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3904 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3905 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3906 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3907 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003908
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003909- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3910 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3911
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003912- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3913 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3914 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3915 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3916 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3917 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3918 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3919 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3920 to Zack Weinberg!
3921
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003922- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3923 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3924 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3925 type. This has been fixed now.
3926
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003927- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3928 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3929 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3930
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003931- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3932 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3933 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3934 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3935 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3936 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3937 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3938 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003939 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003940
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003941- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3942 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3943 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003944
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003945- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3946 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3947 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3948 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3949 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3950 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3951 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3952 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003953 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003954 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3955 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3956
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003957- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3958 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3959 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3960 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3961 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3962 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3963 this.)
3964
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003965- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3966 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003967 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003968 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003969 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3970 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003971 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3972 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003973
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003974- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3975 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3976 currently running.
3977
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003978- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3979 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3980 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3981 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3982
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003983- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3984 as directory names.
3985
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003986- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3987 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3988
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003989- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3990 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3991
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003992- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003993 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3994 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003995
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003996- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3997 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3998 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3999 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
4000 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
4001
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004002- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
4003 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
4004 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
4005 removed.
4006
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00004007- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
4008 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
4009 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
4010
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00004011- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
4012 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
4013 to __debug__.
4014
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00004015- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
4016 string to the left with zeros. For example,
4017 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
4018
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00004019- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
4020 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
4021 deprecated now.
4022
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00004023- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
4024 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
4025 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00004026
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00004027- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
4028 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
4029 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
4030 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
4031 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00004032
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00004033- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
4034 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
4035
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00004036- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
4037 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
4038 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004039 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00004040 is backward compatible.
4041
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00004042- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
4043 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
4044 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
4045 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
4046 could access a pointer to freed memory.
4047
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00004048- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
4049 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
4050 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
4051 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
4052 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
4053 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004054
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00004055- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
4056 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
4057
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004058- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
4059 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
4060
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004061- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
4062 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
4063 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
4064 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
4065 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
4066
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00004067- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
4068 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
4069 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
4070
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004071- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00004072 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
4073
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00004074- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
4075 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
4076 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00004077
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00004078- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
4079 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
4080
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00004081- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
4082 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
4083 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
4084
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00004085- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
4086
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004087Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004088-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004089
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00004090- Added three operators to the operator module:
4091 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
4092 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
4093 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
4094
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00004095- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
4096
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00004097- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
4098 archives.
4099
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004100- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
4101 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
4102 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
4103
4104 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
4105
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00004106- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
4107 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
4108 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00004109 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00004110
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00004111- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
4112 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
4113 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
4114 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00004115 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
4116 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
4117 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
4118 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00004119
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00004120- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
4121 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00004122
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00004123- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
4124
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00004125- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
4126 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
4127
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00004128- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
4129 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
4130 supported.
4131
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00004132- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
4133
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00004134- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
4135 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00004136
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00004137- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
4138 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
4139
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00004140- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
4141
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00004142- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
4143 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
4144
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00004145- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
4146 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
4147 functions but callable type objects.
4148
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004149- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00004150 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004151 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00004152
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00004153- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
4154 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00004155
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00004156- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
4157 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00004158
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00004159- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
4160 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
4161 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
4162 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
4163
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00004164- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
4165 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00004166
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00004167- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
4168 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
4169 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
4170 and __imul__.
4171
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00004172- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00004173 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
4174 is called.
4175
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00004176- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
4177 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
4178 interpreter was compiled.
4179
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00004180- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
4181 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
4182 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004183 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00004184 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
4185 1, not 2.
4186
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00004187- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
4188 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
4189 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
4190 limit.
4191
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00004192- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
4193 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
4194 bug #623464.
4195
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00004196- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
4197 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
4198 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
4199 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
4200
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004201Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004202-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004203
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00004204- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
4205
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00004206- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
4207 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
4208 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
4209 with Python 2.3a2.
4210
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00004211- os.path exposes getctime.
4212
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004213- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004214 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004215 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004216 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004217 unit tests of floating point results.
4218
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00004219- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
4220 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
4221 has been increased.
4222
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00004223- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
4224 executed.
4225
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00004226- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
4227 postinstallation script.
4228
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00004229- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
4230 test the current module.
4231
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004232- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00004233 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
4234 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
4235 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
4236 this behavior needs to be controlled.
4237
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00004238- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00004239 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00004240 Ward's Optik package.
4241
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00004242- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
4243 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
4244 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
4245 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
4246
4247- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
4248 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00004249 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00004250
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00004251- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
4252 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
4253 shelf are binary pickles.
4254
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00004255- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
4256 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
4257
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00004258- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
4259 modules are iterators now.
4260
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00004261- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
4262 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
4263 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
4264 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
4265 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
4266 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004267
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00004268- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
4269 with their entity value.
4270
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00004271- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
4272
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004273- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
4274 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00004275
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004276- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
4277 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004278 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00004279
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00004280- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
4281 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
4282 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
4283 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
4284 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
4285 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
4286 main():
4287
4288 import locale
4289 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
4290
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00004291- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
4292 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
4293
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00004294- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
4295 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
4296 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
4297 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
4298 to the new standard.
4299
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00004300- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
4301 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
4302 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
4303 an extension to the database.
4304
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004305- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
4306 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
4307 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
4308 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00004309 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004310
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004311- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00004312 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004313
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00004314- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
4315 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
4316 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
4317 bounded integers.
4318
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00004319- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
4320 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
4321 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
4322 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
4323 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
4324 in existence.
4325
4326 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
4327 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
4328 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
4329 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
4330 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
4331 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
4332
4333 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
4334 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
4335 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
4336 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
4337
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00004338- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
4339 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
4340 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
4341
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00004342- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
4343
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004344- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
4345 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
4346 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
4347 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
4348
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00004349- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
4350 argument.
4351
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00004352- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
4353 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
4354 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
4355 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
4356 [SF patch 560794].
4357
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004358- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
4359 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
4360 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00004361 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
4362 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
4363 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004364
4365- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
4366 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00004367
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00004368- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
4369 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
4370 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
4371 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00004372
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00004373- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
4374 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
4375 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
4376 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
4377 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
4378
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004379- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00004380
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00004381- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
4382
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00004383- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
4384 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
4385 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
4386 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
4387 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
4388 identical to None.
4389
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00004390- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
4391 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
4392 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
4393 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
4394 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
4395 results now.
4396
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00004397- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
4398 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
4399
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004400- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
4401 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
4402 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
4403 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
4404 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
4405 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
4406 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
4407 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
4408
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00004409- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
4410
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00004411- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
4412 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
4413
4414- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
4415 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
4416 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
4417 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
4418 and other systems.
4419
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004420- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
4421 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
4422 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
4423 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 +00004424 work well with these.
4425
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00004426- compileall now supports quiet operation.
4427
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004428- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00004429 connections.
4430
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00004431- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
4432 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
4433 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
4434
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00004435- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
4436 sets
4437
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00004438- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
4439 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
4440 name.
4441
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00004442- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
4443 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
4444 passed in.
4445
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004446- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00004447 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00004448 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
4449 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00004450
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00004451- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
4452
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00004453- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
4454
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00004455- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
4456 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
4457 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
4458
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004459- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
4460 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
4461 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
4462 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00004463 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004464
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004465- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004466 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004467 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004468
4469- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
4470 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
4471 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
4472
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004473- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00004474 the value of its expression argument.
4475
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004476- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
4477 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
4478 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
4479
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00004480- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
4481 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
4482 skipstone browser was included.
4483
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00004484- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
4485 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
4486
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004487Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004488-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004489
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00004490- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
4491 names in addition to accepting file names.
4492
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00004493- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
4494 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4495 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4496 still used and useful.)
4497
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004498- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4499 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4500 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4501 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004502
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004503- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4504 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4505 the generated binary.
4506
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004507Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004508-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004509
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004510- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4511
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004512- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4513 except in the hands of experts.
4514
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004515- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004516 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4517 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4518 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004519
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004520- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4521 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4522 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4523 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4524 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4525 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4526 builds.
4527
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004528- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4529 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4530 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4531 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4532 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4533 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4534 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4535 new type.
4536
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004537- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004538
4539 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4540 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4541 positive infinities.
4542
4543 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4544 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4545 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4546 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4547 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4548 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4549 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4550
4551 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4552
4553 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4554
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004555- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4556 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4557 size of the executable.
4558
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004559- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4560 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4561 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4562 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004563
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004564- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4565
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004566- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4567 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4568 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004569
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004570- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4571 well as Unix.
4572
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004573- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4574 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4575 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4576 modules in the README file for details.
4577
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004578C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004579-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004580
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004581- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4582 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004583 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004584 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004585 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004586
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004587- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4588 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4589 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4590 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4591 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4592 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004593 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004594 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4595 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4596 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4597 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4598 aligned.)
4599
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004600- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4601 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4602 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4603
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004604- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4605 level.
4606
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004607- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4608 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4609 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4610 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4611 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4612
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004613- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4614 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4615 code.
4616
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004617- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4618 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4619 adjusting for negative indices.
4620
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004621- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4622 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4623 object.
4624
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004625- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4626 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4627 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4628
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004629- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4630 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004631
4632- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4633
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004634- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4635 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4636 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4637 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4638
4639- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4640
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004641- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004642
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004643- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004644 without going through the buffer API.
4645
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004646- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004647
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004648- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4649 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4650 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4651 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4652
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004653- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4654 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4655
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004656- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004657 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4658
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004659New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004660-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004661
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004662- OpenVMS is now supported.
4663
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004664- AtheOS is now supported.
4665
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004666- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4667
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004668- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4669
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004670Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004671-----
4672
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004673- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4674 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4675 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004676
4677Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004678-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004679
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004680- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4681 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4682 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4683 bugs.
4684 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004685 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004686 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4687 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004688 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004689
4690- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004691 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004692
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004693- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4694 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4695
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004696- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4697 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004698 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004699 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4700
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004701- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4702 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4703 use files" uninstall option).
4704
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004705- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4706
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004707- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4708 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4709
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004710- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4711 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4712 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4713
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004714- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4715 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4716 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4717 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4718 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004719 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4720 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4721 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004722
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004723- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004724 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004725 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4726 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4727 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4728 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4729 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4730 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4731 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4732 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4733 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4734 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4735 work around.
4736
4737- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4738 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4739 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4740 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4741 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4742 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4743 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4744 specified with O_CREAT too).
4745
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004746Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004747----
4748
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004749- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004750
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004751- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4752 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4753 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4754
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004755- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4756 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4757 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4758
4759- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4760 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4761 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4762 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4763 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4764 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4765 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4766 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004767
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004768- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4769 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4770 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004771
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004772- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4773 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4774 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4775 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4776 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004777
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004778- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4779 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4780 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004781
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004782- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4783 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004784
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004785- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4786 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4787 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4788 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4789 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004790
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004791- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4792 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4793 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4794
4795- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4796 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4797 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004798
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004799- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4800 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4801 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4802 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004803 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004804
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004805- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4806 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004807
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004808- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4809 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004810
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004811- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004812 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004813 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4814 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004815
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004816
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004817What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004818===============================
4819
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004820*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4821
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004822Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004823--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004824
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004825- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4826 with a custom metaclass.
4827
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004828Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004829-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004830
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004831- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4832 are proxies.
4833
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004834Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004835-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004836
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004837- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4838 very short strings.
4839
4840- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4841 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4842 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4843 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4844 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4845
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004846Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004847-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004848
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004849- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4850 close or delete time).
4851
4852- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4853 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4854
4855- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4856
4857- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004858 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004859
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004860Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004861-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004862
4863Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004864-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004865
4866C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004867-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004868
4869New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004870-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004871
4872Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004873-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004874
4875Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004876-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004877
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004878- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4879
4880- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4881 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4882
4883- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4884 deleted at process exit time.
4885
4886- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4887 in backslash.
4888
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004889Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004890----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004891
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004892- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4893 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4894 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4895
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004896
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004897What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004898===========================
4899
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004900*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4901
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004902Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004903--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004904
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004905- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4906 been extensively updated. See
4907
4908 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4909
4910 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4911
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004912- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4913 deleted!
4914
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004915- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4916 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4917 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4918 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4919 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4920
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004921- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4922
4923 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4924 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4925
4926 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4927 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4928 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4929 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4930 supported anyway.
4931
4932 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4933 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4934
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004935- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4936 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4937 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4938 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4939 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004940
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004941- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4942 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4943 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4944
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004945Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004946-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004947
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004948- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4949 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4950 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4951 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4952 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4953 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004954 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4955 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4956 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4957 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004958
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004959- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4960 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4961 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4962
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004963Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004964-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004965
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004966- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4967
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004968Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004969-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004970
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004971- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4972 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4973 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4974 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4975 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4976 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4977
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004978- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4979
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004980- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4981
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004982- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4983
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004984- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4985 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4986 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4987
4988- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4989
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004990Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004991-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004992
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004993- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4994 off a search on Google.
4995
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004996Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004997-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004998
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004999- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
5000 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
5001 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
5002 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
5003 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
5004 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
5005 other platforms should do likewise.
5006
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00005007- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
5008 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
5009 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
5010
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00005011C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005012-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00005013
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00005014- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
5015 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
5016 producing key-value pairs.
5017
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00005018- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00005019 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00005020 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
5021 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
5022 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
5023 previously went unchallenged.
5024
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00005025New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005026-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00005027
5028Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005029-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00005030
5031Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005032-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00005033
5034Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005035----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00005036
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00005037- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
5038 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00005039
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00005040- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
5041 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
5042 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
5043 home.
5044
5045
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005046What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005047===========================
5048
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005049*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
5050
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005051Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005052--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005053
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00005054- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
5055 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00005056
5057 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00005058 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00005059
5060 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
5061 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005062 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00005063 This needs to be documented.
5064
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00005065- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
5066 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
5067
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00005068- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
5069 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
5070 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
5071
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00005072- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
5073 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
5074
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00005075- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
5076 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
5077 class forbids it).
5078
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00005079- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
5080 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
5081 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
5082
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00005083- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
5084
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005085Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005086-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005087
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00005088- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
5089 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005090 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00005091
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00005092- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
5093 (like 1 + '').
5094
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005095Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005096-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005097
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00005098- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
5099 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
5100 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
5101 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005102 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00005103 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
5104
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00005105- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
5106 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
5107 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
5108 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
5109
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00005110- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
5111 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00005112 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
5113 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
5114 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00005115
5116- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
5117 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00005118
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00005119- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
5120 bytes on its input.
5121
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005122Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005123-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005124
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00005125- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00005126 convenience function.
5127
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00005128- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
5129 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
5130 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005131 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
5132 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
5133 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
5134 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
5135 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
5136 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00005137
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00005138- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
5139 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
5140 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
5141 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
5142
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00005143- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
5144 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
5145 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
5146
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00005147- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
5148 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
5149 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
5150 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
5151
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005152- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
5153 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005154 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005155 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
5156 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
5157 new -l and -e options.
5158
5159- statcache is now deprecated.
5160
5161- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
5162 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005163 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005164 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
5165 time properly taken into account.
5166
5167- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
5168 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
5169 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
5170 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
5171
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005172Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005173-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005174
5175Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005176-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005177
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005178- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
5179 is built with libdb3 if available.
5180
5181- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
5182
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005183C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005184-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005185
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00005186- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
5187 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
5188 PySequence_Size().
5189
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005190- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
5191
5192- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
5193 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
5194 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
5195
5196- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
5197 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
5198
5199- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
5200 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
5201
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005202New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005203-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005204
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00005205- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
5206 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
5207
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00005208- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
5209 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
5210
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00005211- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
5212
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005213Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005214-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005215
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00005216- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
5217 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
5218
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005219Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005220-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005221
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005222Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005223----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005224
5225- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
5226 removed completely in the next release.
5227
5228- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
5229 OSX.
5230
5231- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
5232 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
5233
5234- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
5235
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005236
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005237What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005238===========================
5239
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005240*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
5241
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005242Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005243--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005244
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005245- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005246 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005247 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005248 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
5249 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005250 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
5251 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005252 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
5253 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00005254
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00005255- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
5256 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
5257
5258- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
5259 class methods, static methods, and properties.
5260
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005261Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005262-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005263
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00005264- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
5265 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
5266 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
5267 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
5268 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
5269 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
5270 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
5271 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
5272
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005273- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
5274 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
5275 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
5276 example).
5277
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005278- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005279 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005280 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005281 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005282
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005283- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
5284 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
5285 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00005286 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005287
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005288- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
5289 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
5290 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
5291 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
5292 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
5293 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
5294
5295 isinstance(x, (A, B))
5296
5297 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
5298
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005299Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005300-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005301
5302- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
5303
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005304- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
5305
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005306- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
5307 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00005308
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005309- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
5310 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
5311 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
5312 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
5313 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
5314 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00005315 attributes.
5316
5317- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
5318 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
5319 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00005320
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005321- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
5322 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
5323 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005324
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005325- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
5326 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
5327 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005328 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
5329 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
5330
5331- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
5332 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005333
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005334Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005335-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005336
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00005337- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
5338 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
5339
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005340- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
5341 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
5342 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
5343 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
5344
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00005345- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
5346 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
5347 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
5348 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
5349
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00005350 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
5351 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
5352 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
5353 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
5354 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
5355 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
5356 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
5357 without losing information).
5358
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005359- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005360 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
5361 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
5362 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
5363 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
5364 module).
5365
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00005366 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005367 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
5368 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
5369 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
5370 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005371
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005372- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00005373 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
5374 encoding.
5375
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00005376- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
5377 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
5378
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005379- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005380 to allow saving the message body to a file.
5381
5382- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
5383 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
5384 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
5385 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
5386
5387- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
5388
5389- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
5390 ON, and OFF.
5391
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005392- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
5393 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
5394
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005395Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005396-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005397
5398- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
5399 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
5400 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005401
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005402- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
5403 been added: -X and -E.
5404
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005405Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005406-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005407
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005408- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
5409 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
5410
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005411C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005412-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005413
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00005414- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
5415 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
5416 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
5417 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
5418 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
5419
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00005420- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
5421 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
5422 as long) arguments.
5423
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005424- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
5425 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
5426 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
5427 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
5428 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
5429 report any bugs or strange behavior).
5430
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005431- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
5432 input.
5433
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005434New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005435-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005436
5437Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005438-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005439
5440Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005441-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005442
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00005443- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
5444 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
5445 is created for .py and .pyw files.
5446
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005447- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
5448 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
5449 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005450 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005451
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005452 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
5453 # (SIGINT) behavior.
5454 import signal
5455 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005456
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005457 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005458 while 1:
5459 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005460 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005461 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
5462 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
5463 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
5464 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005465
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005466
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005467What's New in Python 2.2a4?
5468===========================
5469
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005470*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
5471
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005472Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005473--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005474
5475- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
5476 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
5477 documentation for all operations on list objects.
5478
5479- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
5480 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
5481 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
5482 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
5483 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
5484 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
5485 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005486
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005487- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005488 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005489 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
5490 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
5491 associate a docstring with a property.
5492
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005493- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
5494 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5495 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5496 other built-in object types.
5497
5498- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5499 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5500 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5501 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5502 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5503
5504- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5505 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5506
5507- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5508 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005509 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005510 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5511 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5512 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5513 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5514 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5515
5516- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5517 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5518 class.
5519
5520- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5521 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5522 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5523 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5524
5525- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5526 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5527 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5528 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5529
5530- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5531 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5532
5533- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5534 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5535 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5536 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5537 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005538 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005539 with the same value as s.
5540
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005541- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5542
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005543Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005544----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005545
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005546- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5547
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005548- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5549 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5550 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5551 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5552 objects.
5553
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005554- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5555 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005556 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5557 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5558
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005559- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5560 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5561 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5562
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005563Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005564-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005565
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005566- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5567 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5568 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5569 by the instances.
5570
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005571- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5572 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5573 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5574
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005575- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5576 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5577 before the entire comparison is complete.
5578
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005579- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5580 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5581 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5582
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005583- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5584 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5585 getwriter().
5586
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005587- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5588 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5589
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005590- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005591 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5592 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5593
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005594- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5595 iterable object.
5596
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005597- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5598 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005599
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005600- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5601 authentication.
5602
5603- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5604 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005605
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005606- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005607 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5608 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5609 a sample driver.)
5610
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005611Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005612-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005613
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005614- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5615 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5616 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5617 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5618 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5619 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5620 kernel has large file support.
5621
5622- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5623 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5624 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5625 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5626 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5627
5628- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5629 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5630 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5631
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005632C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005633-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005634
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005635- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5636 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5637
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005638New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005639-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005640
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005641- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5642 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5643
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005644Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005645-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005646
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005647- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5648 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5649 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5650 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5651 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5652
5653- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5654 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5655 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5656 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5657
5658- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5659 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5660
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005661Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005662-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005663
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005664- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005665 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5666 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005667
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005668
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005669What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5670===========================
5671
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005672*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5673
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005674Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005675----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005676
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005677- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5678 big to represent as a C double.
5679
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005680- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5681 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5682 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5683 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5684 restriction).
5685
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005686- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5687 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5688 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5689 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5690 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5691
5692 >>> dir([])
5693 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5694 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5695 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5696 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5697 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5698 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5699 'reverse', 'sort']
5700
5701 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5702
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005703- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005704 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5705 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5706 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5707 OverflowError exception.
5708
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005709- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005710 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005711 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5712 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5713 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5714 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5715 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005716 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005717 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5718 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5719
5720 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5721 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5722 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5723 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005724
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005725- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005726 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5727 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5728 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5729 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5730 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5731 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5732 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5733 once it is created.
5734
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005735- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5736 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5737 (key, value) pairs.
5738
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005739- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005740 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5741 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5742
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005743- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5744 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5745 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5746 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5747 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005748
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005749- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005750 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5751 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5752
5753 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5754
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005755- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005756 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5757
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005758Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005759-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005760
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005761- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005762 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5763 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005764
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005765- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5766 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5767 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5768 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5769 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5770 in this area anymore).
5771
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005772- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5773 threading.Timer.
5774
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005775- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5776 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5777
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005778- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005779 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5780
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005781- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005782 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5783 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5784 converted to Python longs.
5785
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005786- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005787 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5788
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005789- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5790 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5791 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5792
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005793Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005794-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005795
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005796- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5797 division operators as per PEP 238.
5798
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005799Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005800-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005801
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005802- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5803 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5804 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5805 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5806
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005807C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005808-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005809
5810- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005811
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005812- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5813 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005814 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005815
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005816 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5817 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005818 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005819 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005820
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005821- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005822 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5823 module:
5824
5825 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005826
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005827 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5828 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005829
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005830 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5831 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005832
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005833 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5834
5835 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5836
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005837- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005838 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5839 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5840 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005841
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005842New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005843-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005844
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005845- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5846 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5847 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5848 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5849 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005850
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005851Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005852-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005853
5854Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005855-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005856
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005857- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5858 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5859 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5860 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005861 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5862 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5863 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5864 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5865 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005866
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005867- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005868 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5869
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005870
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005871What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5872===========================
5873
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005874*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5875
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005876Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005877-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005878
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005879- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5880 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5881
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005882- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5883 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5884 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005885
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005886- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5887 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5888 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5889 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005890
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005891- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5892
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005893- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005894
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005895Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005896-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005897
5898- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005899 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005900 the module docstring for details.
5901
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005902Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005903-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005904
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005905- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005906 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5907 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5908 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005909
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005910- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5911 Nick Mathewson.
5912
5913Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005914----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005915
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005916- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5917 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5918 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5919 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5920 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5921 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5922 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5923 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5924
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005925- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5926 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5927 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5928 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5929
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005930- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5931 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5932 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5933 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5934 come a long way).
5935
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005936- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5937 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5938 write filters for these warnings).
5939
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005940- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5941 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5942 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5943 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5944 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5945
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005946- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5947 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5948 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5949 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5950 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5951 older distribution.
5952
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005953Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005954-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005955
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005956- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5957 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005958 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005959
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005960- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5961 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5962 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5963
5964- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5965
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005966- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5967
5968- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5969
5970- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5971
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005972- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005973
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005974- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5975
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005976New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005977-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005978
5979C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005980-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005981
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005982- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5983 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5984 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5985 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5986 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5987 against buffer overruns.
5988
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005989- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005990 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5991 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005992 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5993 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5994 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5995
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005996- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5997 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5998 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5999 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
6000 deprecated.
6001
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00006002Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006003-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00006004
6005- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
6006 relevant is found.
6007
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00006008
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00006009What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00006010===========================
6011
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006012*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
6013
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00006014Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006015----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006016
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00006017- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
6018 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
6019 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
6020 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
6021 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
6022 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
6023 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
6024 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006025 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00006026 repaired.
6027
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00006028- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00006029 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00006030 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
6031 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
6032 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
6033 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
6034 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
6035 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
6036 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
6037 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
6038
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00006039- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
6040 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
6041 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
6042 leading BMO character).
6043
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00006044- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
6045 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
6046 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
6047
6048 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
6049 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
6050 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00006051
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00006052 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
6053 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
6054 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
6055 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
6056 for various simple to use conversions.
6057
6058 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
6059 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
6060
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006061 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
6062 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
6063 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
6064 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
6065 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
6066 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
6067 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
6068 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
6069 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
6070 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
6071 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
6072 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
6073 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
6074 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
6075 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00006076
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00006077- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
6078 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
6079 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00006080 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00006081 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00006082
6083 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00006084 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
6085 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
6086 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
6087 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
6088 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006089 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
6090 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00006091
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006092 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
6093 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
6094 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00006095 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00006096
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00006097- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
6098 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
6099 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
6100 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
6101 floating arithmetic,
6102
6103 x = 9007199254740992.0
6104 print long(x)
6105
6106 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
6107 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
6108 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
6109 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
6110 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
6111 functions are of good quality).
6112
6113 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
6114 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
6115 algorithms to break.
6116
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00006117- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
6118 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
6119 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
6120 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
6121 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
6122 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
6123 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
6124 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
6125 order.
6126
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00006127- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
6128 operation along the most common code paths.
6129
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00006130- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
6131 the same as dict.has_key(x).
6132
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00006133- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
6134 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
6135 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
6136 {}.update(UserDict())
6137
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00006138- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
6139 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
6140 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
6141 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
6142 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
6143 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
6144 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
6145 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
6146
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00006147- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00006148 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006149
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00006150 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00006151 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
6152 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00006153 join() method of strings
6154 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00006155 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
6156 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006157 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00006158 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00006159
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00006160- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
6161 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
6162
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00006163- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
6164 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
6165
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00006166- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
6167 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
6168 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
6169 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
6170
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00006171- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
6172 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00006173 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00006174 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
6175 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00006176
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00006177- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
6178
6179
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006180Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006181-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006182
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00006183- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006184 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00006185 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
6186 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
6187
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00006188- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
6189 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
6190
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00006191- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
6192 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
6193 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
6194 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
6195
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00006196- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
6197 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
6198 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
6199
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00006200- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
6201
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00006202- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
6203
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00006204- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
6205 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
6206 that are still imported into string.py).
6207
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006208- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
6209
6210- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
6211 Now it does.
6212
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00006213- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
6214
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00006215- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
6216 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
6217 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
6218 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
6219 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00006220 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
6221 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00006222
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00006223- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
6224 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
6225 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
6226 'help(object)'.
6227
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006228Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006229-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006230
6231- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006232 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006233 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
6234 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
6235
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006236- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00006237 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
6238 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006239
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00006240C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006241-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00006242
6243- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
6244 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006245
6246----
6247
6248**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**