blob: 73171f3031be718bf46ee474b11d958e5c52e18f [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
Neal Norwitz67715f02005-11-09 06:59:35 +000015- SF Bug #1350188, "setdlopenflags" leads to crash upon "import"
16 It was possible dlerror() returns a NULL pointer, use a default error
17 message in this case.
18
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +000019- Replaced most Unicode charmap codecs with new ones using the
20 new Unicode translate string feature in the builtin charmap
21 codec; the codecs were created from the mapping tables available
22 at ftp.unicode.org and contain a few updates (e.g. the Mac OS
23 encodings now include a mapping for the Apple logo)
24
25- Added a few more codecs for Mac OS encodings
26
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +000027- Speed up some Unicode operations.
28
29- A new AST parser implementation was completed.
30
Neal Norwitzb6570f52005-10-21 06:26:10 +000031- SF bug #1167751: fix incorrect code being for generator expressions.
Neal Norwitz16af7342005-10-21 06:25:33 +000032 The following code now raises a SyntaxError: foo(a = i for i in range(10))
33
Neal Norwitz708e51a2005-10-03 04:48:15 +000034- SF Bug #976608: fix SystemError when mtime of an imported file is -1.
35
Neal Norwitz11bd1192005-10-03 00:54:56 +000036- SF Bug #887946: fix segfault when redirecting stdin from a directory.
37 Provide a warning when a directory is passed on the command line.
38
Neal Norwitz40d37812005-10-02 01:48:49 +000039- Fix segfault with invalid coding.
40
41- SF bug #772896: unknown encoding results in MemoryError.
42
Raymond Hettinger6b27cda2005-09-24 21:23:05 +000043- All iterators now have a Boolean value of true. Formerly, some iterators
44 supported a __len__() method which evaluated to False when the iterator
45 was empty.
46
Guido van Rossum630db602005-09-20 18:49:54 +000047- On 64-bit platforms, when __len__() returns a value that cannot be
48 represented as a C int, raise OverflowError.
49
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000050- test__locale is skipped on OS X < 10.4 (only partial locale support is
Walter Dörwald6611a8b2005-10-09 19:28:35 +000051 present).
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000052
Georg Brandl80bbf3f2005-09-14 19:38:29 +000053- SF bug #893549: parsing keyword arguments was broken with a few format
54 codes.
55
Guido van Rossum8ee3e5a2005-09-14 18:09:42 +000056- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on AIX 5.3
57 with IBM's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1284289). This also closes SF
58 bug #105470: test_pwd fails on 64bit system (Opteron).
59
Guido van Rossum539c6622005-09-14 17:49:54 +000060- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on HP-UX 11 on
61 Itanium2 with HP's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1225212).
62
Georg Brandl4550b8d2005-08-26 06:43:52 +000063- Disallow keyword arguments for type constructors that don't use them
Georg Brandl02c42872005-08-26 06:42:30 +000064 (fixes bug #1119418).
65
Martin v. Löwisd35edda2005-08-24 08:39:24 +000066- Forward UnicodeDecodeError into SyntaxError for source encoding errors.
67
Barry Warsawe2eca0b2005-08-15 18:14:19 +000068- SF bug #900092: When tracing (e.g. for hotshot), restore 'return' events for
69 exceptions that cause a function to exit.
70
Raymond Hettinger9f1a6792005-07-31 01:16:36 +000071- The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
72 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
73 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
74
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +000075- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
76
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +000077- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
78 reference counts in some error exit cases.
79
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000080- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
81 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
82 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
83 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
84 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
85 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
86 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
87 realloc.
88
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +000089- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
90 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
91
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +000092- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
93 like their int counterparts.
94
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +000095- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
96 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
97 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
98 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
99 for a longer write-up of the problem).
100
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +0000101- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
102 serializing floats.
103
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +0000104- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
105 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
106 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
107
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +0000108- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
109 278.
110
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000111- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
112 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
113 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
114 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000115 to the base class has been moved to the proper nb_* magic slot and out of
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000116 PyNumber_*().
117 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
118
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +0000119- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
120 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
121 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
122 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
123
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +0000124- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
125 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
126 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
127 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
128 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
129
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +0000130- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
131 disabled caused a crash.
132
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000133- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
134 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
135
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000136- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +0000137 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
138
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +0000139- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
140
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000141- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +0000142 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
143 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
144 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000145
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +0000146- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
147
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +0000148- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
149 returning None.
150
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000151- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +0000152 ('\') with a specific error message.
153
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +0000154- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
155
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +0000156- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
157 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
158
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000159- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000160 an ferror() call.
161
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000162- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
163 list.sort().
164
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000165- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
166 (2+3) --> (5).
167
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000168- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
169
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000170- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
171 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000172
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000173- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
174 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
175 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
176
Neil Schemenauercf52c072005-08-12 17:34:58 +0000177- Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a
178 unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and
179 calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance.
180
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000181Extension Modules
182-----------------
183
Georg Brandla13c2442005-11-22 19:30:31 +0000184- Bug #869197: os.setgroups rejects long integer arguments
185
Neal Norwitz0f46bbf2005-11-03 05:00:25 +0000186- Bug #1346533, select.poll() doesn't raise an error if timeout > sys.maxint
187
Neal Norwitz7b631792005-11-02 05:26:07 +0000188- Bug #1344508, Fix UNIX mmap leaking file descriptors
189
Neal Norwitzf3396542005-10-28 05:52:22 +0000190- Patch #1338314, Bug #1336623: fix tarfile so it can extract
191 REGTYPE directories from tarfiles written by old programs.
192
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +0000193- Get bsddb module to build with BSD DB version 3.2
194
Neal Norwitz484d9a42005-09-30 04:46:49 +0000195- Patch #1309009, Fix segfault in pyexpat when the XML document is in latin_1,
196 but Python incorrectly assumes it is in UTF-8 format
197
Georg Brandle677adc2005-09-29 13:40:49 +0000198- Fix parse errors in the readline module when compiling without threads.
199
Hye-Shik Chang9ceebd52005-09-24 14:58:47 +0000200- Patch #1288833: Removed thread lock from socket.getaddrinfo on
201 FreeBSD 5.3 and later versions which got thread-safe getaddrinfo(3).
202
Michael W. Hudson10402a32005-09-22 09:19:01 +0000203- Patches #1298449 and #1298499: Add some missing checks for error
204 returns in cStringIO.c.
205
Neal Norwitz058bde12005-09-21 06:44:25 +0000206- Patch #1297028: fix segfault if call type on MultibyteCodec,
207 MultibyteStreamReader, or MultibyteStreamWriter
208
Neal Norwitzcfe7dd92005-09-19 06:49:27 +0000209- Fix memory leak in posix.access().
210
Martin v. Löwis8b291e22005-09-18 08:17:56 +0000211- Patch #1213831: Fix typo in unicodedata._getcode.
212
Georg Brandlfb1ef852005-09-14 20:53:32 +0000213- Bug #1007046: os.startfile() did not accept unicode strings encoded in
214 the file system encoding.
215
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000216- Patch #756021: Special-case socket.inet_aton('255.255.255.255') for
217 platforms that don't have inet_aton().
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000218
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000219- Bug #1215928: Fix bz2.BZ2File.seek() for 64-bit file offsets.
220
221- Bug #1191043: Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines for files containing one
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000222 line without newlines.
223
Georg Brandl38387b82005-08-24 07:17:40 +0000224- Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did
225 on Windows.
226
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000227- Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
Martin v. Löwisebd9d5b2005-08-09 15:00:59 +0000228 st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
229
Michael W. Hudson8137bea2005-07-27 20:24:40 +0000230- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
231 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
232 for large or negative values.
233
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000234- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000235 implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false.
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000236
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000237- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
238
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000239- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
240 if available on the platform.
241
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000242- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
243 available on the platform.
244
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000245- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
246 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
247
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000248- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
249
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000250- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
251 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
252 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
253
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000254- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
255
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000256- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
257 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
258
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000259- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000260 file size.
261
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000262- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
263
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000264- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
265 {remove_history,replace_history}
266
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000267- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
268 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000269
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000270- stat_float_times is now True.
271
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000272- array.array objects are now picklable.
273
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000274- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
275 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
276
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000277- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
278 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
279 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
280
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000281- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
282 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000283
284Library
285-------
286
Brett Cannonad07ff22005-11-23 02:15:50 +0000287- Patch #1314396: prevent deadlock for threading.Thread.join() when an exception
288 is raised within the method itself on a previous call (e.g., passing in an
289 illegal argument)
290
Brett Cannon5d0bf942005-11-02 23:04:26 +0000291- Bug #1340337: change time.strptime() to always return ValueError when there
292 is an error in the format string.
293
Georg Brandle8f24432005-10-03 14:16:44 +0000294- Patch #754022: Greatly enhanced webbrowser.py (by Oleg Broytmann).
295
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000296- Bug #729103: pydoc.py: Fix docother() method to accept additional
Georg Brandl8b813db2005-10-01 16:32:31 +0000297 "parent" argument.
298
Georg Brandlaa935172005-09-29 20:49:16 +0000299- Patch #1300515: xdrlib.py: Fix pack_fstring() to really use null bytes
300 for padding.
301
Georg Brandl80ba8e82005-09-29 20:16:07 +0000302- Bug #1296004: httplib.py: Limit maximal amount of data read from the
303 socket to avoid a MemoryError on Windows.
304
Matthias Klosef3f231f2005-09-20 07:02:49 +0000305- Patch #1166948: locale.py: Prefer LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE and LANG over LANGUAGE
306 to get the correct encoding.
307
308- Patch #1166938: locale.py: Parse LANGUAGE as a colon separated list of
309 languages.
310
Martin v. Löwis4ed67382005-09-18 08:34:39 +0000311- Patch #1268314: Cache lines in StreamReader.readlines for performance.
312
Brett Cannona783d062005-09-15 02:34:56 +0000313- Bug #1290505: Fix clearing the regex cache for time.strptime().
314
Martin v. Löwis5dbdc592005-08-27 10:07:56 +0000315- Bug #1167128: Fix size of a symlink in a tarfile to be 0.
316
Georg Brandl5a650a22005-08-26 08:51:34 +0000317- Patch #810023: Fix off-by-one bug in urllib.urlretrieve reporthook
318 functionality.
319
Martin v. Löwis8b595142005-08-25 11:03:38 +0000320- Bug #1163178: Make IDNA return an empty string when the input is empty.
321
Georg Brandl532efab2005-08-24 22:34:21 +0000322- Patch #848017: Make Cookie more RFC-compliant. Use CRLF as default output
323 separator and do not output trailing semicola.
324
Georg Brandlb9256022005-08-24 18:46:39 +0000325- Patch #1062060: urllib.urlretrieve() now raises a new exception, named
326 ContentTooShortException, when the actually downloaded size does not
327 match the Content-Length header.
328
Martin v. Löwis0a5d4a22005-08-24 14:55:22 +0000329- Bug #1121494: distutils.dir_utils.mkpath now accepts Unicode strings.
330
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000331- Bug #1178484: Return complete lines from codec stream readers
332 even if there is an exception in later lines, resulting in
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000333 correct line numbers for decoding errors in source code.
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000334
Georg Brandl6d2b3462005-08-24 07:36:17 +0000335- Bug #1192315: Disallow negative arguments to clear() in pdb.
336
Martin v. Löwisb813c532005-08-07 20:51:04 +0000337- Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
338
Georg Brandl649f8e72005-08-03 07:30:12 +0000339- Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
340 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
341
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000342- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
343 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
344 Tkdnd.
345
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000346- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
347 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
348
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000349- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
350 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
351
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000352- textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000353 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
354
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000355- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
356 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
357
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000358- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
359 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
360
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000361- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000362 it can be missing in embedded interpreters
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000363
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000364- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
365
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000366- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
367 error messages.
368
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000369- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
370
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000371- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
372 Bug #1224621.
373
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000374- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
375 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
376 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
377 terminates by raising StopIteration.
378
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000379- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
380
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000381- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
382 component of the path.
383
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000384- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
385 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
386 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
387 class at all.
388
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000389- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
390 files to PyPI.
391
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000392- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
393 them to PyPI.
394
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000395- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
396 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
397 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
398 work as expected.
399
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000400- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
401 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
402
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000403- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000404 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
405
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000406- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
407
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000408- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
409 to build.
410
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000411- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
412 symbolic links on Windows.
413
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000414- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000415 profile.py if available.
416
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000417- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
418
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000419- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
420 in LWPCookieJar.
421
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000422- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
423
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000424- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
425
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000426- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
427
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000428- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
429
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000430- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
431
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000432- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
433
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000434- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
435
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000436- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
437
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000438- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
439 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
440 be exploited in various ways.
441
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000442- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
443
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000444- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
445
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000446- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
447
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000448- Enhancements to the csv module:
449
450 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000451 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000452 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000453 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
454 reporting.
455 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
456 dictates.
457 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000458 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000459 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000460 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
461 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000462 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
463 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000464 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000465 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
466 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
467 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
468 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
469 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
470 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
471 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
472 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
473 without first creating a dialect class.
474 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
475 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
476 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000477 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000478 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
479 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000480 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
481 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
482 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
483 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000484 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
485 This has been fixed.
486
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000487- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
488 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
489 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
490 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
491
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000492- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
493
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000494- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
495 (Bug #951915).
496
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000497- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
498 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
499 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000500 encoding alias table.
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000501
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000502- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
503
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000504- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
505 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
506
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000507- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
508
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000509- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
510
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000511- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
512
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000513- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
514
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000515- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
516
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000517- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
518 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
519 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
520
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000521- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000522 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000523
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000524- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
525 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
526 tokenizer with very long source lines.
527
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000528- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
529 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
530
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000531- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
532 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000533
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000534- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
535 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
536
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000537- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
538 correctly.
539
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000540- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
541 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
542 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
543 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
544 between two lines.
545
Walter Dörwalda47d1c02005-08-30 10:23:14 +0000546- Bug #1251300: On UCS-4 builds the "unicode-internal" codec will now complain
547 about illegal code points. The codec now supports PEP 293 style error
548 handlers.
549
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000550- Bug #1235646: ``codecs.StreamRecoder.next()`` now reencodes the data it reads
Walter Dörwaldc5238b82005-09-01 11:56:53 +0000551 from the input stream, so that the output is a byte string in the correct
552 encoding instead of a unicode string.
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000553
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000554- Bug #1202493: Fixing SRE parser to handle '{}' as perl does, rather than
555 considering it exactly like a '*'.
556
Walter Dörwald007f8df2005-10-09 19:42:27 +0000557- Bug #1245379: Add "unicode-1-1-utf-7" as an alias for "utf-7" to
558 ``encodings.aliases``.
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000559
Walter Dörwald09f0dd52005-11-21 19:10:07 +0000560- ` uu.encode()`` and ``uu.decode()`` now support unicode filenames.
561
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000562Build
563-----
564
Martin v. Löwis147fbe52005-08-07 21:09:30 +0000565- Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
566 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
567
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000568- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
569 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
570
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000571- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
572 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
573 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000574 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000575
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000576- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
577 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
578 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
579
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000580- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
581
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000582- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
583 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
584
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000585- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
586 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
587 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
588 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
589 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
590 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
591 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
592 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
593
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000594- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
595 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
596 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
597 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
598
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000599
600C API
601-----
602
Raymond Hettingerbeb31012005-08-16 03:47:52 +0000603- Added a C API for set and frozenset objects.
604
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000605- Removed PyRange_New().
606
Walter Dörwaldd1c1e102005-10-06 20:29:57 +0000607- Patch #1313939: PyUnicode_DecodeCharmap() accepts a unicode string as the
608 mapping argument now. This string is used as a mapping table. Byte values
609 greater than the length of the string and 0xFFFE are treated as undefined
610 mappings.
611
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000612
613Tests
614-----
615
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000616- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000617
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000618
619Documentation
620-------------
621
Georg Brandl32252422005-09-14 20:42:00 +0000622- Bug #1274828: Document os.path.splitunc().
623
Georg Brandl79c122f2005-08-24 07:31:33 +0000624- Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py.
625
Georg Brandl6f2bbd32005-08-24 07:26:55 +0000626- Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation.
627
Georg Brandlf13c4ba2005-08-02 10:28:08 +0000628- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
629
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000630- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
631
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000632- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
633
634- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
635
636- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
637
638- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
639
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000640- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
641 Closes bug #1166582.
642
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000643- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
644 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
645 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
646
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000647Mac
648---
649
650
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000651New platforms
652-------------
653
654- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
655
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000656
657Tools/Demos
658-----------
659
Georg Brandl56897312005-08-24 18:32:30 +0000660- Added two new files to Tools/scripts: pysource.py, which recursively
661 finds Python source files, and findnocoding.py, which finds Python
662 source files that need an encoding declaration.
663 Patch #784089, credits to Oleg Broytmann.
664
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000665- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
666
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000667- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000668
669
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000670What's New in Python 2.4 final?
671===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000672
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000673*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000674
675Core and builtins
676-----------------
677
678- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
679 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
680 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
681
682
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000683What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
684==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000685
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000686*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000687
688Core and builtins
689-----------------
690
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000691- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
692 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
693 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
694
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000695
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000696Library
697-------
698
699- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
700 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
701 raised is re-raised.
702
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000703- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
704 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
705
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000706- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
707 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
708 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
709 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
710 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
711 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
712 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
713 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
714 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
715 by the slice are recomputed now.
716
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000717- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000718
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000719Build
720-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000721
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000722- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
723 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
724 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000725
726C API
727-----
728
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000729- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
730
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000731
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000732What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
733================================
734
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000735*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000736
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000737License
738-------
739
740The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
741is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
742changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
743Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
744intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
745durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
746the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
747License::
748
749 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
750
751says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
752to Python 2.1.1.
753
754The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
755License Version 2.
756
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000757Core and builtins
758-----------------
759
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000760- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
761 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
762 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
763 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
764 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
765 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
766 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
Andrew M. Kuchlingb2a739d2005-11-22 15:14:44 +0000767 ``AttributeError`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000768 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
769 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
770
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000771- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000772
773Extension Modules
774-----------------
775
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000776- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
777 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
778 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
779 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000780
781Library
782-------
783
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000784- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
785 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
786 returned.
787
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000788- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
789
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000790- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
791 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
792
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000793- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
794
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000795- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
796 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000797
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000798- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
799
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000800- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
801
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000802- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000803 the source code is updated and reloaded.
804
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000805Build
806-----
807
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000808- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000809
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000810What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
811================================
812
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000813*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000814
815Core and builtins
816-----------------
817
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000818- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000819 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
820
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000821- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
822 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
823 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
824 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
825
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000826- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
827 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
828
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000829- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
830 constant.
831
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000832- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
833 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
834 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
835 large), and to anomalies such as
836 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
837 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
838 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
839 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000840
841Extension modules
842-----------------
843
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000844- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
845 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000846 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
847 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
848 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000849
850Library
851-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000852
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000853- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000854 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000855 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
856 --swig-cpp.
857
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000858- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
859 it is set.
860
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000861- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000862
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000863- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
864 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
865 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
866 Closes bug #1039270.
867
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000868- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000869
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000870 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000871 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
872 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
873 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
874 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
875 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
876 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
877 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
878 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
879 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
880 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
881 + Updates to documentation.
882
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000883- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
884 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
885 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
886 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
887
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000888- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000889
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000890- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
891 applications should use the getmember function.
892
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000893- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
894
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000895- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
896 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
897 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
898 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
899 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
900 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
901 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
902 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
903 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
904
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000905- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
906 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000907 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000908
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000909- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
910 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
911 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
912 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
913 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
914 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
915 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
916 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000917
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000918- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
919 the new public features (of which there are many).
920
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000921- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000922 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
923 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
924 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
925 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000926 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000927
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000928- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
929
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000930- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
931 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
932 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
933 options.
934
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000935- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
936 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
937 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
938 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
939 conditions under which non-string values work.
940
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000941Build
942-----
943
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000944- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
945 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
946 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
947
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000948- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
949 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
950 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
951 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
952 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000953
954C API
955-----
956
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000957- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
958 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
959
960- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
961
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000962- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
963 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
964 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
965 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
966 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
967 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
968 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
969 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
970 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
971
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000972- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
973
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000974- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
975 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
976 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000977
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000978Tests
979-----
980
981- test__locale ported to unittest
982
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000983Mac
984---
985
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000986- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
987 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
988 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000989
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000990Tools/Demos
991-----------
992
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000993- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
994 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
995 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
996 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
997 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000998
999
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001000What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
1001=================================
1002
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +00001003*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001004
1005Core and builtins
1006-----------------
1007
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001008- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001009 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
1010
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001011- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
1012 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
1013 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
1014 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
1015 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
1016 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
1017 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
1018 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001019 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
1020 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
1021 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
1022 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
1023 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001024
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +00001025- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
1026 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
1027 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
1028 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
1029 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
1030
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +00001031- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
1032
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +00001033- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
1034 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
1035
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +00001036- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
1037 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
1038 modified the list.
1039
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +00001040- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
1041 functions is now writable.
1042
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +00001043- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
1044 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
1045 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
1046 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
1047
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001048- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
1049 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
1050 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
1051 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
1052 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +00001053
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +00001054- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
1055 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
1056
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001057Extension modules
1058-----------------
1059
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001060- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
1061
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +00001062- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
1063 data.
1064
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001065- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
1066 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
1067 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
1068 supposed to have been truncated away.
1069
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +00001070- Added socket.socketpair().
1071
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +00001072- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
1073 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
1074
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001075- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +00001076 versions of Python, have now been removed.
1077
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001078Library
1079-------
1080
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001081- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001082 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001083
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +00001084- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
1085 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
1086
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +00001087- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
1088 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
1089
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001090- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
1091
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +00001092- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
1093 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +00001094
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +00001095- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
1096 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
1097
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +00001098- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
1099
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +00001100- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
1101
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +00001102- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
1103
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +00001104- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
1105 Percivall.
1106
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +00001107- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
1108 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
1109
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001110- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
1111 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
1112 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001113 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001114
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001115- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
1116 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
1117 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
1118 and exponent.
1119
1120- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
1121
1122- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +00001123 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001124 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
1125
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001126- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
1127 to the readline module.
1128
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001129- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001130 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
1131 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001132
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +00001133- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
1134 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
1135 contains symlinks.
1136
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +00001137- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
1138 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
1139
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +00001140- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
1141 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
1142 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1143
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001144- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
1145 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
1146 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
1147 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
1148 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
1149 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
1150 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
1151 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
1152 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
1153 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
1154 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
1155 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
1156 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
1157
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +00001158- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
1159
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001160Tools/Demos
1161-----------
1162
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001163- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
1164 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
1165
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +00001166- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
1167
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001168Build
1169-----
1170
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001171- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
1172 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
1173 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
1174 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
1175 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
1176 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
1177 plans to do so.
1178
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +00001179- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
1180 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
1181
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +00001182- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
1183 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
1184
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001185- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
1186 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
1187
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +00001188- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
1189 GNU/k*BSD systems.
1190
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +00001191- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
1192 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
1193
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001194C API
1195-----
1196
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001197..
1198
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001199Documentation
1200-------------
1201
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001202- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1203 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1204
1205- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1206 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1207 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001208
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001209New platforms
1210-------------
1211
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001212- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1213
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001214Tests
1215-----
1216
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001217..
1218
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001219Windows
1220-------
1221
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001222- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1223 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1224 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1225 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1226 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1227 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1228 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1229 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1230 the problem.
1231
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001232Mac
1233---
1234
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001235..
1236
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001237
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001238What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1239=================================
1240
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001241*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001242
1243Core and builtins
1244-----------------
1245
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001246- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1247 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1248 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1249 sensitive code.
1250
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001251- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001252 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001253
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001254 @staticmethod
1255 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001256
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001257 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001258
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001259- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1260 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1261 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1262 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1263 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1264 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1265 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1266 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1267 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1268 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1269 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1270
1271 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1272 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1273 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1274 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1275 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1276 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1277 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1278
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001279- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1280 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1281
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001282- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001283 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001284
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001285- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001286 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001287 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1288
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001289- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001290 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1291 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1292
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001293- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1294 types that support garbage collection.
1295
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001296- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1297
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001298- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1299 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1300 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1301 Jython.
1302
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001303- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1304
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001305- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1306 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1307
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001308- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1309 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1310 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001311
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001312- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1313 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1314 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1315
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001316Extension modules
1317-----------------
1318
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001319- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1320
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001321Library
1322-------
1323
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001324- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1325 TIS-620
1326
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001327- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1328 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1329 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1330 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1331 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1332 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1333 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1334 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1335 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1336 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1337
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001338- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1339
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001340- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1341 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1342 same as when the argument is omitted).
1343 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1344
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001345- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1346
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001347- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1348 schemes are offered.
1349
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001350- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1351
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001352- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1353 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1354 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1355
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001356- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1357
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001358- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1359 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1360
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001361- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1362 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1363 when dummy_threading is being used.
1364
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001365- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1366 from a tarfile.
1367
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001368- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001369 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001370
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001371- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1372 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1373 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1374 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1375
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001376- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1377 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1378
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001379- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1380 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1381 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1382 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1383 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1384 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1385 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1386 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1387 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1388 by some other method in progress).
1389
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001390- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1391 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1392 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001393
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001394- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1395
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001396- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1397 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1398 AM Kuchling.
1399
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001400- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1401 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1402 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1403
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001404- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1405 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1406 instead of unsigned.
1407
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001408- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001409 no longer part of the public API.
1410
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001411- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1412 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1413 string methods of the same name).
1414
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001415- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001416 SF patch 945642.
1417
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001418- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1419
1420 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1421
1422 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1423 DocTestSuites.
1424
1425- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1426 that provide thread-local data.
1427
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001428- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1429 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1430
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001431- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1432
1433- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1434 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1435 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1436
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001437- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1438
1439 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1440 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1441 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001442
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001443 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1444 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1445 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1446 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1447
1448 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1449 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1450
1451 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1452 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1453 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1454 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1455
1456 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1457 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1458 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1459 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1460 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1461
1462 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1463 wrapping help output.
1464
1465 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1466 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1467 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001468
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001469C API
1470-----
1471
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001472- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1473 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1474 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1475 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1476 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1477 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1478 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1479 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1480 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1481 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1482 its visible semantics have not changed.
1483
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001484- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1485 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1486
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001487Documentation
1488-------------
1489
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001490- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001491
1492 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001493 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001494
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001495 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001496
1497 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1498
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001499- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001500
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001501Tests
1502-----
1503
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001504- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001505 platforms that use the Makefile.
1506
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001507- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1508 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1509 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1510
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001511
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001512What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1513=================================
1514
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001515*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001516
1517Core and builtins
1518-----------------
1519
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001520- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1521 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1522 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1523 objects now (one object instead of three).
1524
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001525- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1526 Windows DLLs.
1527
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001528- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1529 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001530
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001531- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1532 a new .pyc magic.
1533
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001534- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1535 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1536 be there.
1537
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001538- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1539 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1540 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1541
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001542- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1543 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1544 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1545
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001546- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1547
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001548- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1549 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1550 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001551
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001552- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1553 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1554
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001555- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1556
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001557- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001558 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001559
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001560- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1561
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001562- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1563
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001564- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1565 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1566
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001567- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1568 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1569 Fixes bug #858016 .
1570
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001571- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1572 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1573 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1574
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001575- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1576 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1577 improves their performance (about 35%).
1578
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001579- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1580 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1581 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1582
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001583- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1584 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1585 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1586 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1587
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001588- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1589 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001590 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001591 length is not known).
1592
1593- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1594 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001595 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1596 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001597 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1598
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001599- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1600 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1601
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001602- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1603 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1604 keyword arguments.
1605
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001606- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1607 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1608 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1609
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001610- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1611 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1612 cases.
1613
1614- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1615 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1616 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1617 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1618 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1619 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1620 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1621 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1622 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1623 a release build.
1624
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001625- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1626 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1627
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001628- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001629 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001630
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001631- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1632 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1633 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1634 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1635 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1636 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1637 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1638 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1639 destroyed.
1640
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001641- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1642 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1643 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1644 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1645 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1646 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1647 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1648 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1649
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001650- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1651 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1652 character other than a space.
1653
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001654- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1655 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1656 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1657 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1658 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1659 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1660 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1661 attributes with the same name.
1662
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001663- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1664 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1665 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1666 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1667 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1668 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1669 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1670 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1671 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1672 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1673 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1674 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1675 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1676 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001677
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001678- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1679 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1680 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1681 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1682 This has been repaired.
1683
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001684- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1685
1686- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1687
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001688- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1689 over a sequence.
1690
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001691- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001692 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001693
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001694- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1695
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001696- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1697 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1698 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1699 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1700 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1701 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1702 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1703 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1704
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001705- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1706 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1707 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1708
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001709- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1710 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1711 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1712 freelist.
1713
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001714- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1715 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1716
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001717- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1718 number.
1719
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001720- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1721 a TypeError exception.
1722
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001723- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1724 820195.
1725
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001726- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1727 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1728 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1729
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001730- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001731 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1732 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001733
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001734- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1735 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1736 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1737
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001738- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1739 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001740 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001741
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001742- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001743 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1744 the first call.
1745
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001746
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001747Extension modules
1748-----------------
1749
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001750- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1751 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1752
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001753- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1754 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1755 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1756 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1757 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1758 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1759 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001760
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001761- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1762
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001763- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1764
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001765- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1766 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1767
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001768- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1769 fewer false positives.
1770
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001771- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1772 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1773
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001774- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001775 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1776
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001777- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001778 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001779 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001780 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1781 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001782
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001783- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1784 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1785 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1786 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1787
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001788- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1789 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1790 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1791 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1792 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1793 #897625.
1794
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001795- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1796 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1797
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001798- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1799 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1800 and pops on either side of the deque.
1801
1802- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1803 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1804
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001805- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1806 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1807 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1808 other functions that expect a function argument.
1809
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001810- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1811
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001812- os.getsid was added.
1813
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001814- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1815 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1816 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1817
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001818- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1819
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001820- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1821
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001822- readline.clear_history was added.
1823
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001824- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1825
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001826- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1827
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001828- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1829
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001830- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1831
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001832- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1833
1834- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1835
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001836- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1837
1838- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1839
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001840- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1841 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1842 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1843
1844- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1845 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1846 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1847 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1848 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1849 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1850 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1851
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001852- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1853 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1854 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1855 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001856
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001857- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001858 iterators from a single iterable.
1859
1860- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1861 of raising a TypeError exception.
1862
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001863- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1864 as parameter.
1865
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001866Library
1867-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001868
Georg Brandlf0de6a12005-08-22 18:02:59 +00001869- Bug #1266283: The new function "lexists" is now in os.path.__all__.
1870
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001871- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1872 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1873 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001874
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001875- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1876 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1877 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001878
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001879- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001880
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001881- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1882 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001883
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001884- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1885 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1886
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001887- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1888
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001889- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001890 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001891
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001892- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001893 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001894
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001895- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1896
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001897- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1898 on cygwin and mingw32.
1899
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001900- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1901
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001902- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1903 module.
1904
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001905- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1906 installation scheme for all platforms.
1907
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001908- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001909 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001910
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001911- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1912 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1913 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1914
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001915- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1916 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1917 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1918
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001919- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1920
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001921- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1922
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001923- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1924 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1925
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001926- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1927 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1928 type pattern with the same value exists.
1929
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001930- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1931 when run from the command prompt).
1932
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001933- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1934 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1935
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001936- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1937 default sort).
1938
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001939- Added global runctx function to profile module
1940
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001941- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1942
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001943- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1944
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001945- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1946
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001947- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001948 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1949 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1950 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1951 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1952 accordingly.
1953
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001954- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1955 decoding standards.
1956
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001957- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1958 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1959 called for all requests.
1960
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001961- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1962 they are passed to the compiler.
1963
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001964- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1965 indent, width and depth.
1966
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001967- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1968 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1969
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001970- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1971 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1972
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001973- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1974
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001975- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1976
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001977- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1978
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001979- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1980 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1981
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001982- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001983 for better performance.
1984
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001985- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001986
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001987- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1988 a string).
1989
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001990- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1991
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001992- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1993
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001994- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1995
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001996- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1997
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001998- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1999 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
2000 list of fieldnames.
2001
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00002002- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
2003 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
2004
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00002005- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
2006
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00002007- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
2008 empty lists.
2009
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00002010- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
2011 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
2012 and shelves.
2013
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00002014- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
2015 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
2016
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002017- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00002018 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
2019 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002020
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00002021- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
2022 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00002023 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00002024
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002025- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00002026 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
2027 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
2028
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002029- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
2030 and removed in Py2.4.
2031
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00002032- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
2033
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00002034- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
2035
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002036Tools/Demos
2037-----------
2038
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00002039- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
2040 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
2041
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00002042- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
2043
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00002044- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
2045 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
2046 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
2047 destination in situations where both files are given.
2048
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00002049- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
2050 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
2051 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
2052 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
2053
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00002054- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
2055
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00002056- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
2057 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
2058 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
2059 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
2060 now.
2061
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002062- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
2063 in effect
2064
2065- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
2066 C-c C-h
2067
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00002068- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
2069 -d option was given.
2070
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002071Build
2072-----
2073
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00002074- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
2075 build under OS X.
2076
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00002077- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
2078 --enable-profiling.
2079
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00002080- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
2081 is configured --with-tsc.
2082
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00002083- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
2084 on AMD64.
2085
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00002086- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
2087 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
2088
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00002089- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
2090 removed.
2091
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00002092- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
2093 supported (see PEP 11).
2094
2095- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
2096
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00002097- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
2098
2099- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
2100 (see PEP 11).
2101
2102- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
2103 sizeof(char) must be 1.
2104
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002105C API
2106-----
2107
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00002108- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
2109 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
2110 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
2111
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00002112- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
2113 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
2114 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
2115 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
2116
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00002117- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
2118 generator objects.
2119
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002120- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
2121 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00002122 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
2123 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002124
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00002125- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
2126 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
2127
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00002128- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
2129 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
2130 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
2131 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
2132 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
2133
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00002134- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
2135 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
2136 about 10% faster.
2137
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00002138- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
2139 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
2140
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00002141- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
2142 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
2143 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
2144 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
2145
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002146Windows
2147-------
2148
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00002149- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
2150 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
2151 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
2152 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
2153
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00002154- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
2155 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
2156 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
2157
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002158
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002159What's New in Python 2.3 final?
2160===============================
2161
2162*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
2163
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002164IDLE
2165----
2166
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00002167- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
2168 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
2169 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
2170 context-menu actions.
2171
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002172- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
2173 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
2174 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
2175 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
2176 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
2177 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
2178 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
2179 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
2180 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
2181
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002182
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002183What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
2184=============================================
2185
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00002186*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002187
2188Core and builtins
2189-----------------
2190
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002191- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002192 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002193 comment at the end are still unsupported.
2194
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002195Extension modules
2196-----------------
2197
2198- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
2199 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
2200 than once. This has been fixed.
2201
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002202- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2203 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2204 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2205 call.
2206
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002207- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2208
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002209Library
2210-------
2211
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002212- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2213 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2214
2215- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2216 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2217 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2218 restored.
2219
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002220IDLE
2221----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002222
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002223- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002224
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002225Build
2226-----
2227
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002228- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2229 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2230
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002231C API
2232-----
2233
2234Windows
2235-------
2236
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002237- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2238 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2239
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002240- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2241
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002242Mac
2243---
2244
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002245- Various fixes to pimp.
2246
2247- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2248
2249- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2250 more problems than it solves.
2251
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002252
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002253What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2254=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002255
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002256*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2257
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002258Core and builtins
2259-----------------
2260
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002261- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2262 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2263
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002264- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2265 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002266 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002267
2268- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2269 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2270 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002271 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002272
2273- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2274 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002275
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002276- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2277 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2278 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2279
2280- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002281 770247.
2282
2283- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002284
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002285Extension modules
2286-----------------
2287
2288- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2289 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2290
2291- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2292
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002293- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2294
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002295- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2296 contained within the _strptime module.
2297
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002298- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2299 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2300
2301- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002302 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2303
2304- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2305 the find_class attribute, if present.
2306
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002307- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002308
2309 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2310 (SF bug 763298).
2311
2312 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002313 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2314 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2315 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002316
2317 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2318
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002319Library
2320-------
2321
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002322- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2323
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002324- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2325 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2326 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2327 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2328 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2329 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2330 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2331 or Tester().
2332
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002333- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2334 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2335 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2336 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2337 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2338 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2339 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2340 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2341 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002342
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002343 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002344
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002345- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2346 weren't before was an oversight.
2347
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002348- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2349 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2350
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002351- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2352 when there are no lines.
2353
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002354- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2355 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2356
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002357- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2358 to child processes.
2359
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002360- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2361
2362- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2363
2364- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2365 xmlrpclib.
2366
2367- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2368 responses.
2369
2370- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2371 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2372
2373- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2374 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2375 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2376
2377- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2378 used as patterns.
2379
2380- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2381 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2382 than Tk 8.3.
2383
2384- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2385
2386- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002387
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002388Tools/Demos
2389-----------
2390
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002391- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2392
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002393- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2394
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002395- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002396
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002397Build
2398-----
2399
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002400- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2401
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002402- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2403
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002404- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2405 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002406
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002407- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2408 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2409 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002410
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002411C API
2412-----
2413
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002414- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2415 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2416
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002417Windows
2418-------
2419
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002420- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2421 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2422 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2423 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2424 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2425 Python exception ::
2426
2427 thread.error: can't start new thread
2428
2429 is raised now.
2430
2431- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2432 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2433 instead of from DLL teardown.
2434
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002435Mac
2436---
2437
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002438- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002439 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002440 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2441 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2442 the executable in the bundle.
2443
2444- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002445
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002446- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2447
2448- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2449 on Panther.
2450
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002451What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2452================================
2453
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002454*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002455
2456Core and builtins
2457-----------------
2458
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002459- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2460 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2461 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2462 with the -i option.
2463
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002464- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2465 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2466
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002467- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2468 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2469
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002470- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2471 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2472 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2473 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2474 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2475 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2476 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2477 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2478 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2479 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2480 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2481 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2482 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002483
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002484- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2485 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2486 embedded in a lambda expression.
2487
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002488- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2489 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2490 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2491 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2492 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2493
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002494- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2495 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2496 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2497
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002498- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2499 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2500
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002501- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2502 It's writable again.
2503
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002504- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2505 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2506 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002507 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002508
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002509- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2510 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2511 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2512
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002513Extension modules
2514-----------------
2515
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002516- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2517 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2518
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002519- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2520 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2521 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2522 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2523
2524- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2525 collection.
2526
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002527- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2528 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2529 unique within a single program run.
2530
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002531- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2532 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2533
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002534- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2535 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2536
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002537- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2538 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002539
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002540- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2541
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002542- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2543 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2544
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002545- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2546 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2547 for many BSD-derived systems.
2548
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002549
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002550Library
2551-------
2552
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002553- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2554 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2555 primary ones:
2556
2557 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2558 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2559 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2560
2561 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2562 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2563 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2564 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2565 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2566 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2567
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002568- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2569 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2570 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2571 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2572 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2573 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2574 argument.
2575
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002576- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2577 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2578 in the archive.
2579
2580- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2581 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2582
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002583- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2584 569574).
2585
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002586- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2587 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2588 no more.
2589
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002590- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2591 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2592 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2593 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2594 code coverage.
2595
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002596- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2597 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2598 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002599 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2600 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002601
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002602- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2603 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2604 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002605 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002606
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002607- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2608
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002609- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2610 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2611 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2612 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2613
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002614- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2615 handling.
2616
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002617- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2618 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2619
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002620- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2621 in socket.py.
2622
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002623- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2624
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002625- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2626 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2627 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2628 opener with proxy support.
2629
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002630- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2631
2632- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2633
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002634Tools/Demos
2635-----------
2636
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002637- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2638
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002639- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2640
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002641- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2642 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002643
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002644- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2645 files.
2646
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002647Build
2648-----
2649
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002650- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002651 different root directory.
2652
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002653C API
2654-----
2655
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002656- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2657 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2658 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2659 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2660 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2661 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2662 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2663 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2664 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2665 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2666
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002667- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2668 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2669 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2670 from Python.
2671
2672
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002673New platforms
2674-------------
2675
2676None this time.
2677
2678Tests
2679-----
2680
2681- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2682 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2683
2684Windows
2685-------
2686
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002687- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2688
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002689- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2690 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2691 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2692 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2693 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2694 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2695 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2696 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2697 that's what it's for.
2698
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002699Mac
2700---
2701
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002702- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2703 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2704 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2705 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002706- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2707 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2708- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002709
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002710SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2711------------------------------------
2712
2713430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2714598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2715622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2716661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2717683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2718697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2719713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2720724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2721727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2722729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2723730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2724731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2725732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2726733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2727735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2728740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2729744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2730745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2731747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2732749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2733751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2734753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2735755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2736757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2737760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2738
2739
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002740What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2741================================
2742
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002743*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002744
2745Core and builtins
2746-----------------
2747
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002748- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2749 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2750
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002751- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2752 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2753 and cannot be strings).
2754
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002755- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2756 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2757 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2758 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2759
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002760- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2761 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2762 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2763 Python itself.
2764
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002765- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2766 the referenced object, if it has one.
2767
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002768- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2769 the thread started at
2770 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2771
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002772- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2773 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2774 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2775 placed on a list index.
2776
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002777- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2778 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2779 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2780 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2781
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002782- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2783 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2784 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2785 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2786 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2787 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2788 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2789
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002790- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2791 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2792 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2793 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2794 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2795
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002796- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2797 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002798
2799- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2800 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2801 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2802 #693195.)
2803
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002804- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2805 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002806
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002807- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002808 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002809 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2810 interpreter executions, would fail.
2811
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002812- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002813 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002814 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002815
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002816Extension modules
2817-----------------
2818
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002819- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2820 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2821 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2822 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2823
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002824- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2825 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2826
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002827- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2828 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2829 and Greg Chapman.)
2830
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002831- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2832 recursively.
2833
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002834- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002835 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2836 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2837 leaks.
2838
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002839- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2840
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002841- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2842 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2843 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2844 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2845 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2846 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2847 #705836.
2848
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002849- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002850 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2851
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002852- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2853 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2854 See SF bug #692416.
2855
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002856- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2857 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2858
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002859- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2860 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2861 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002862
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002863- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002864 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2865 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2866
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002867- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2868 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2869 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2870 timeouts to work properly.
2871
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002872Library
2873-------
2874
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002875- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2876 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2877 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2878 future release.
2879
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002880- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2881 for querying platform dependent features.
2882
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002883- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002884
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002885- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2886 pickle protocol versions.
2887
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002888- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2889 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2890 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2891
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002892- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2893
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002894- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2895 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2896 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2897 modules.
2898
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002899- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2900 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2901 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2902
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002903- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2904 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2905
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002906- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2907 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2908 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2909
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002910- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002911 MS Office extensions.
2912
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002913- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2914 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2915
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002916- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2917 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2918
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002919- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2920 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2921 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2922 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2923 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2924 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2925
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002926- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2927 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2928 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002929
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002930- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2931 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2932 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2933
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002934- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2935
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002936- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2937 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2938 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2939
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002940Tools/Demos
2941-----------
2942
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002943- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2944 See the module docstring for details.
2945
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002946Build
2947-----
2948
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002949- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2950 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002951
2952C API
2953-----
2954
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002955- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2956
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002957- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2958 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2959 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2960
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002961- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2962 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002963
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002964 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2965 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2966 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002967
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002968- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002969 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2970
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002971- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2972 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2973 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002974
2975New platforms
2976-------------
2977
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002978None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002979
2980Tests
2981-----
2982
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002983- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2984 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002985
2986Windows
2987-------
2988
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002989- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2990 function.
2991
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002992- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2993 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002994
2995Mac
2996---
2997
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002998- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2999 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00003000
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00003001- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
3002 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003003
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00003004- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
3005 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
3006 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003007
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003008- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00003009 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
3010 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003011
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003012- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
3013 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003014
3015
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003016What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
3017=================================
3018
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003019*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003020
3021Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003022-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003023
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00003024- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
3025 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
3026 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
3027
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00003028- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
3029 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
3030 (SF patch #664376.)
3031
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003032- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
3033 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
3034 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
3035 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
3036 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
3037 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00003038 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003039
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003040- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
3041 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
3042 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
3043 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003044 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003045
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00003046- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
3047 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
3048 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
3049 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
3050 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
3051 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
3052 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
3053 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
3054 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
3055 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
3056 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
3057
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00003058- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
3059 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
3060 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
3061 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
3062 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
3063 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
3064
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00003065- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
3066 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
3067
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00003068- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
3069 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
3070 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
3071 case.)
3072
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00003073- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
3074 passed as unicode strings.
3075
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00003076- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
3077 See SF bug #683467.
3078
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00003079- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
3080 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
3081
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00003082- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
3083
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00003084- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
3085
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00003086- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
3087 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
3088 arguments.
3089
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00003090- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
3091 See SF bug #667147.
3092
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003093- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003094 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003095 See SF bug #676155.
3096
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003097- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003098 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003099 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
3100 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
3101 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
3102 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
3103 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
3104 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003105
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003106Extension modules
3107-----------------
3108
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003109- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
3110 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3111 tp_as_number pointer.
3112
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003113- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
3114 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
3115 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
3116 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
3117 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
3118
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003119- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
3120
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00003121- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
3122
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003123- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00003124 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003125 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
3126 patch #678531.)
3127
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00003128- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
3129 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
3130
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00003131- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
3132 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
3133
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00003134- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
3135
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00003136- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
3137 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
3138 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
3139
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003140- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
3141
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003142- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
3143 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
3144
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003145- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003146
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003147- datetime changes:
3148
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00003149 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
3150
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003151 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
3152 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
3153 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
3154 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
3155 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
3156 now.
3157
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003158 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003159 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
3160 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003161
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003162 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003163 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003164 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
3165 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
3166 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
3167 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003168
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003169 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
3170 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
3171 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003172 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
3173
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003174 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
3175 by a later example coded by Guido.
3176
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003177 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003178 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
3179 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
3180 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003181 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
3182 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
3183
3184 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
3185 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
3186 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
3187 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
3188 tzinfo subclass instance.
3189
3190 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
3191 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
3192 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
3193 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
3194 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
3195 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
3196 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
3197 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003198
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003199 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
3200 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3201 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3202 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3203 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003204 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3205
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003206 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003207
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003208 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3209 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3210 as a naive datetime object.
3211
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003212 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3213 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3214 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3215
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003216 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3217 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3218 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3219 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3220 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3221 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3222 comparison.
3223
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003224 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3225 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3226 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3227 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003228 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003229
3230 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003231
3232 and ::
3233
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003234 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3235
3236 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3237 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3238 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3239 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3240
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003241 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3242 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3243 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3244 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3245 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3246
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003247 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3248 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003249 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3250 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003251
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003252Library
3253-------
3254
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003255- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3256 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3257
3258- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3259 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3260 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3261 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3262 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3263 See PEP 307 for details.
3264
3265- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3266 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3267
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003268- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3269 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003270 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003271 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3272 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003273 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003274
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003275- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3276 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3277
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003278- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3279 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3280 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3281
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003282- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3283
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003284- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3285 exception.
3286
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003287- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3288 class.
3289
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003290- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3291 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3292 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3293
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003294- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3295 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3296
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003297- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003298 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3299 See SF bug #659228.
3300
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003301- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3302 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3303 See SF patch #651082.
3304
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003305- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003306
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003307- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3308 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3309
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003310- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003311 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003312
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003313- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3314 DOS paths from other platforms.
3315
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003316Tools/Demos
3317-----------
3318
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003319- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3320 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3321 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3322 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3323 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3324 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3325 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3326 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3327 example:
3328
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003329 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3330 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003331
3332 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3333
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003334
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003335Build
3336-----
3337
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003338- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3339 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3340 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003341 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3342
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003343 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3344
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003345- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3346 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3347 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3348 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3349 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3350 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3351 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3352 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3353 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3354
3355- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3356 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3357 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3358 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3359
3360- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3361 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3362
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003363C API
3364-----
3365
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003366- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3367 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003368
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003369- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3370 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3371 tp_as_number pointer.
3372
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003373- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3374 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3375 (SF #681367)
3376
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003377- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3378 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3379 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3380 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003381
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003382Tests
3383-----
3384
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003385- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003386 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3387 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3388 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3389 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3390 pydoc.)
3391
3392- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3393
3394- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003395
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003396Windows
3397-------
3398
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003399- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3400 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3401 time).
3402
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003403- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3404 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3405
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003406- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3407 release without strong cryptography.
3408
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003409- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003410 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003411
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003412- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3413 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3414
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003415Mac
3416---
3417
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003418- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3419 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003420
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003421- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3422 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3423 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003424
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003425- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3426 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003427
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003428- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3429 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3430 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3431 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003432
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003433- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003434 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3435 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3436 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003437
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003438
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003439What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003440=================================
3441
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003442*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003443
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003444Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003445--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003446
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003447- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3448
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003449- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3450 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003451 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003452 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003453 a different meaning than before.
3454
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003455- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003456 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003457 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003458
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003459- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003460 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003461 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003462
3463- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3464 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3465 and deallocation.
3466
3467- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3468 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3469
3470- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3471 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3472 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3473 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3474 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3475
3476- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3477 now detected by the garbage collector.
3478
3479- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3480 [SF bug 519621]
3481
3482- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3483 identifier.
3484
3485- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3486 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3487 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3488 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3489 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3490 [SF bug 563060]
3491
3492- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3493 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3494 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3495 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3496 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3497
3498- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3499 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3500 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3501
3502- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3503
3504- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3505 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3506 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3507 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3508 state of the slots would be lost.)
3509
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003510Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003511-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003512
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003513- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003514 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3515 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3516 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3517 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003518 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3519 Jython 2.1.
3520
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003521- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003522 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003523 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3524 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3525 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3526 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3527 these, see PEP 302.
3528
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003529- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3530 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3531 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3532
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003533- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3534 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3535 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3536
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003537- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3538 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3539 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3540
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003541- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3542 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3543 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3544 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3545 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3546 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3547 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3548 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3549 releases or implementations.
3550
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003551- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003552 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3553 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003554
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003555- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3556 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3557
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003558- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3559 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3560 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3561
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003562- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3563 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3564
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003565- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3566 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003567 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3568 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003569
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003570- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3571 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3572 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3573 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3574 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3575
3576 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3577 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3578 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3579 pattern.
3580
3581 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3582 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3583 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3584 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3585
3586 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3587 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3588 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3589 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3590 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3591 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3592
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003593- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3594 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3595 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3596 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3597 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3598 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3599 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3600 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003601
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003602- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3603 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3604 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3605 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3606 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003607 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3608 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3609 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3610 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3611 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3612 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3613 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003614
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003615- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3616 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3617
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003618- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3619 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3620 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3621 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3622 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3623 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3624 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3625 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3626 to Zack Weinberg!
3627
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003628- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3629 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3630 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3631 type. This has been fixed now.
3632
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003633- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3634 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3635 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3636
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003637- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3638 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3639 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3640 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3641 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3642 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3643 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3644 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003645 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003646
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003647- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3648 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3649 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003650
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003651- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3652 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3653 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3654 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3655 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3656 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3657 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3658 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003659 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003660 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3661 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3662
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003663- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3664 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3665 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3666 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3667 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3668 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3669 this.)
3670
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003671- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3672 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003673 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003674 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003675 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3676 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003677 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3678 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003679
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003680- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3681 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3682 currently running.
3683
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003684- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3685 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3686 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3687 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3688
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003689- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3690 as directory names.
3691
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003692- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3693 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3694
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003695- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3696 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3697
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003698- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003699 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3700 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003701
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003702- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3703 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3704 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3705 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3706 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3707
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003708- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3709 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3710 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3711 removed.
3712
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003713- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3714 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3715 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3716
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003717- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3718 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3719 to __debug__.
3720
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003721- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3722 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3723 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3724
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003725- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3726 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3727 deprecated now.
3728
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003729- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3730 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3731 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003732
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003733- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3734 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3735 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3736 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3737 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003738
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003739- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3740 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3741
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003742- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3743 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3744 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003745 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003746 is backward compatible.
3747
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003748- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3749 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3750 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3751 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3752 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3753
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003754- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3755 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3756 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3757 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3758 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3759 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003760
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003761- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3762 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3763
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003764- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3765 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3766
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003767- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3768 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3769 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3770 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3771 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3772
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003773- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3774 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3775 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3776
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003777- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003778 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3779
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003780- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3781 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3782 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003783
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003784- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3785 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3786
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003787- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3788 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3789 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3790
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003791- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3792
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003793Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003794-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003795
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003796- Added three operators to the operator module:
3797 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3798 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3799 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3800
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003801- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3802
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003803- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3804 archives.
3805
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003806- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3807 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3808 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3809
3810 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3811
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003812- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3813 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3814 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003815 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003816
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003817- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3818 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3819 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3820 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003821 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3822 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3823 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3824 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003825
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003826- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3827 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003828
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003829- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3830
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003831- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3832 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3833
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003834- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3835 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3836 supported.
3837
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003838- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3839
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003840- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3841 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003842
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003843- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3844 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3845
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003846- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3847
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003848- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3849 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3850
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003851- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3852 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3853 functions but callable type objects.
3854
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003855- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003856 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003857 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003858
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003859- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3860 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003861
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003862- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3863 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003864
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003865- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3866 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3867 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3868 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3869
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003870- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3871 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003872
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003873- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3874 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3875 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3876 and __imul__.
3877
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003878- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003879 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3880 is called.
3881
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003882- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3883 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3884 interpreter was compiled.
3885
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003886- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3887 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3888 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003889 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003890 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3891 1, not 2.
3892
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003893- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3894 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3895 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3896 limit.
3897
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003898- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3899 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3900 bug #623464.
3901
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003902- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3903 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3904 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3905 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3906
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003907Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003908-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003909
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003910- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3911
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003912- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3913 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3914 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3915 with Python 2.3a2.
3916
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003917- os.path exposes getctime.
3918
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003919- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003920 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003921 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003922 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003923 unit tests of floating point results.
3924
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003925- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3926 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3927 has been increased.
3928
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003929- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3930 executed.
3931
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003932- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3933 postinstallation script.
3934
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003935- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3936 test the current module.
3937
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003938- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003939 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3940 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3941 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3942 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3943
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003944- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003945 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003946 Ward's Optik package.
3947
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003948- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3949 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3950 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3951 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3952
3953- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3954 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003955 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003956
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003957- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3958 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3959 shelf are binary pickles.
3960
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003961- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3962 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3963
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003964- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3965 modules are iterators now.
3966
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003967- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3968 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3969 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3970 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3971 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3972 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003973
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003974- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3975 with their entity value.
3976
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003977- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3978
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003979- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3980 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003981
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003982- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3983 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003984 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003985
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003986- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3987 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3988 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3989 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3990 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3991 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3992 main():
3993
3994 import locale
3995 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3996
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003997- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3998 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3999
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00004000- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
4001 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
4002 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
4003 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
4004 to the new standard.
4005
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00004006- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
4007 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
4008 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
4009 an extension to the database.
4010
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004011- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
4012 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
4013 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
4014 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00004015 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004016
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004017- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00004018 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004019
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00004020- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
4021 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
4022 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
4023 bounded integers.
4024
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00004025- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
4026 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
4027 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
4028 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
4029 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
4030 in existence.
4031
4032 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
4033 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
4034 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
4035 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
4036 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
4037 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
4038
4039 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
4040 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
4041 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
4042 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
4043
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00004044- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
4045 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
4046 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
4047
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00004048- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
4049
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004050- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
4051 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
4052 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
4053 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
4054
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00004055- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
4056 argument.
4057
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00004058- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
4059 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
4060 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
4061 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
4062 [SF patch 560794].
4063
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004064- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
4065 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
4066 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00004067 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
4068 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
4069 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004070
4071- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
4072 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00004073
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00004074- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
4075 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
4076 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
4077 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00004078
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00004079- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
4080 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
4081 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
4082 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
4083 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
4084
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004085- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00004086
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00004087- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
4088
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00004089- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
4090 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
4091 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
4092 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
4093 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
4094 identical to None.
4095
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00004096- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
4097 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
4098 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
4099 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
4100 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
4101 results now.
4102
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00004103- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
4104 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
4105
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004106- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
4107 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
4108 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
4109 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
4110 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
4111 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
4112 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
4113 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
4114
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00004115- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
4116
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00004117- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
4118 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
4119
4120- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
4121 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
4122 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
4123 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
4124 and other systems.
4125
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004126- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
4127 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
4128 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
4129 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 +00004130 work well with these.
4131
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00004132- compileall now supports quiet operation.
4133
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004134- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00004135 connections.
4136
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00004137- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
4138 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
4139 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
4140
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00004141- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
4142 sets
4143
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00004144- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
4145 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
4146 name.
4147
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00004148- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
4149 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
4150 passed in.
4151
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004152- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00004153 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00004154 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
4155 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00004156
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00004157- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
4158
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00004159- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
4160
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00004161- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
4162 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
4163 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
4164
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004165- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
4166 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
4167 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
4168 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00004169 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004170
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004171- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004172 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004173 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004174
4175- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
4176 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
4177 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
4178
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004179- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00004180 the value of its expression argument.
4181
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004182- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
4183 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
4184 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
4185
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00004186- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
4187 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
4188 skipstone browser was included.
4189
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00004190- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
4191 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
4192
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004193Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004194-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004195
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00004196- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
4197 names in addition to accepting file names.
4198
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00004199- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
4200 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4201 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4202 still used and useful.)
4203
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004204- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4205 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4206 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4207 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004208
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004209- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4210 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4211 the generated binary.
4212
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004213Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004214-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004215
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004216- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4217
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004218- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4219 except in the hands of experts.
4220
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004221- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004222 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4223 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4224 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004225
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004226- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4227 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4228 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4229 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4230 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4231 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4232 builds.
4233
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004234- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4235 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4236 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4237 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4238 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4239 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4240 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4241 new type.
4242
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004243- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004244
4245 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4246 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4247 positive infinities.
4248
4249 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4250 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4251 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4252 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4253 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4254 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4255 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4256
4257 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4258
4259 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4260
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004261- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4262 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4263 size of the executable.
4264
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004265- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4266 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4267 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4268 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004269
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004270- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4271
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004272- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4273 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4274 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004275
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004276- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4277 well as Unix.
4278
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004279- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4280 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4281 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4282 modules in the README file for details.
4283
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004284C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004285-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004286
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004287- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4288 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004289 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004290 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004291 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004292
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004293- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4294 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4295 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4296 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4297 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4298 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004299 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004300 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4301 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4302 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4303 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4304 aligned.)
4305
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004306- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4307 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4308 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4309
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004310- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4311 level.
4312
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004313- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4314 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4315 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4316 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4317 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4318
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004319- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4320 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4321 code.
4322
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004323- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4324 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4325 adjusting for negative indices.
4326
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004327- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4328 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4329 object.
4330
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004331- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4332 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4333 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4334
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004335- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4336 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004337
4338- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4339
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004340- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4341 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4342 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4343 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4344
4345- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4346
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004347- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004348
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004349- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004350 without going through the buffer API.
4351
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004352- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004353
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004354- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4355 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4356 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4357 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4358
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004359- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4360 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4361
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004362- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004363 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4364
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004365New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004366-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004367
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004368- OpenVMS is now supported.
4369
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004370- AtheOS is now supported.
4371
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004372- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4373
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004374- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4375
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004376Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004377-----
4378
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004379- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4380 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4381 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004382
4383Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004384-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004385
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004386- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4387 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4388 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4389 bugs.
4390 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004391 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004392 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4393 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004394 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004395
4396- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004397 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004398
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004399- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4400 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4401
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004402- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4403 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004404 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004405 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4406
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004407- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4408 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4409 use files" uninstall option).
4410
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004411- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4412
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004413- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4414 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4415
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004416- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4417 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4418 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4419
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004420- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4421 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4422 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4423 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4424 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004425 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4426 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4427 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004428
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004429- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004430 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004431 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4432 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4433 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4434 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4435 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4436 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4437 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4438 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4439 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4440 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4441 work around.
4442
4443- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4444 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4445 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4446 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4447 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4448 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4449 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4450 specified with O_CREAT too).
4451
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004452Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004453----
4454
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004455- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004456
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004457- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4458 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4459 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4460
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004461- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4462 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4463 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4464
4465- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4466 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4467 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4468 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4469 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4470 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4471 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4472 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004473
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004474- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4475 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4476 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004477
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004478- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4479 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4480 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4481 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4482 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004483
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004484- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4485 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4486 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004487
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004488- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4489 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004490
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004491- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4492 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4493 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4494 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4495 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004496
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004497- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4498 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4499 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4500
4501- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4502 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4503 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004504
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004505- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4506 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4507 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4508 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004509 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004510
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004511- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4512 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004513
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004514- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4515 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004516
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004517- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004518 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004519 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4520 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004521
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004522
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004523What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004524===============================
4525
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004526*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4527
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004528Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004529--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004530
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004531- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4532 with a custom metaclass.
4533
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004534Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004535-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004536
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004537- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4538 are proxies.
4539
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004540Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004541-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004542
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004543- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4544 very short strings.
4545
4546- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4547 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4548 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4549 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4550 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4551
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004552Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004553-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004554
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004555- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4556 close or delete time).
4557
4558- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4559 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4560
4561- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4562
4563- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004564 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004565
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004566Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004567-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004568
4569Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004570-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004571
4572C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004573-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004574
4575New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004576-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004577
4578Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004579-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004580
4581Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004582-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004583
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004584- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4585
4586- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4587 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4588
4589- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4590 deleted at process exit time.
4591
4592- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4593 in backslash.
4594
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004595Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004596----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004597
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004598- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4599 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4600 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4601
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004602
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004603What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004604===========================
4605
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004606*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4607
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004608Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004609--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004610
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004611- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4612 been extensively updated. See
4613
4614 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4615
4616 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4617
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004618- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4619 deleted!
4620
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004621- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4622 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4623 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4624 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4625 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4626
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004627- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4628
4629 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4630 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4631
4632 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4633 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4634 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4635 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4636 supported anyway.
4637
4638 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4639 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4640
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004641- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4642 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4643 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4644 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4645 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004646
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004647- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4648 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4649 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4650
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004651Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004652-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004653
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004654- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4655 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4656 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4657 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4658 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4659 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004660 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4661 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4662 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4663 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004664
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004665- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4666 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4667 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4668
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004669Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004670-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004671
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004672- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4673
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004674Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004675-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004676
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004677- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4678 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4679 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4680 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4681 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4682 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4683
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004684- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4685
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004686- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4687
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004688- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4689
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004690- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4691 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4692 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4693
4694- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4695
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004696Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004697-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004698
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004699- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4700 off a search on Google.
4701
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004702Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004703-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004704
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004705- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4706 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4707 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4708 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4709 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4710 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4711 other platforms should do likewise.
4712
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004713- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4714 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4715 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4716
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004717C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004718-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004719
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004720- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4721 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4722 producing key-value pairs.
4723
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004724- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004725 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004726 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4727 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4728 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4729 previously went unchallenged.
4730
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004731New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004732-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004733
4734Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004735-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004736
4737Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004738-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004739
4740Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004741----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004742
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004743- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4744 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004745
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004746- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4747 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4748 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4749 home.
4750
4751
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004752What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004753===========================
4754
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004755*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4756
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004757Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004758--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004759
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004760- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4761 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004762
4763 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004764 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004765
4766 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4767 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004768 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004769 This needs to be documented.
4770
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004771- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4772 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4773
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004774- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4775 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4776 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4777
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004778- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4779 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4780
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004781- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4782 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4783 class forbids it).
4784
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004785- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4786 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4787 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4788
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004789- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4790
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004791Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004792-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004793
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004794- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4795 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004796 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004797
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004798- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4799 (like 1 + '').
4800
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004801Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004802-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004803
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004804- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4805 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4806 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4807 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004808 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004809 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4810
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004811- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4812 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4813 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4814 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4815
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004816- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4817 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004818 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4819 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4820 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004821
4822- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4823 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004824
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004825- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4826 bytes on its input.
4827
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004828Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004829-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004830
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004831- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004832 convenience function.
4833
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004834- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4835 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4836 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004837 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4838 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4839 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4840 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4841 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4842 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004843
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004844- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4845 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4846 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4847 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4848
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004849- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4850 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4851 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4852
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004853- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4854 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4855 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4856 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4857
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004858- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4859 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004860 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004861 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4862 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4863 new -l and -e options.
4864
4865- statcache is now deprecated.
4866
4867- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4868 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004869 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004870 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4871 time properly taken into account.
4872
4873- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4874 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4875 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4876 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4877
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004878Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004879-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004880
4881Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004882-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004883
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004884- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4885 is built with libdb3 if available.
4886
4887- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4888
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004889C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004890-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004891
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004892- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4893 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4894 PySequence_Size().
4895
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004896- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4897
4898- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4899 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4900 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4901
4902- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4903 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4904
4905- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4906 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4907
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004908New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004909-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004910
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004911- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4912 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4913
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004914- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4915 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4916
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004917- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4918
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004919Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004920-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004921
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004922- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4923 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4924
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004925Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004926-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004927
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004928Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004929----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004930
4931- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4932 removed completely in the next release.
4933
4934- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4935 OSX.
4936
4937- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4938 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4939
4940- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4941
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004942
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004943What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004944===========================
4945
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004946*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4947
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004948Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004949--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004950
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004951- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004952 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004953 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004954 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4955 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004956 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4957 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004958 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4959 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004960
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004961- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4962 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4963
4964- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4965 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4966
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004967Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004968-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004969
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004970- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4971 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4972 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4973 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4974 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4975 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4976 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4977 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4978
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004979- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4980 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4981 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4982 example).
4983
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004984- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004985 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004986 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004987 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004988
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004989- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4990 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4991 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004992 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004993
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004994- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4995 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4996 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4997 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4998 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4999 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
5000
5001 isinstance(x, (A, B))
5002
5003 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
5004
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005005Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005006-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005007
5008- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
5009
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005010- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
5011
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005012- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
5013 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00005014
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005015- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
5016 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
5017 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
5018 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
5019 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
5020 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00005021 attributes.
5022
5023- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
5024 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
5025 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00005026
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005027- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
5028 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
5029 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005030
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005031- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
5032 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
5033 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005034 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
5035 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
5036
5037- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
5038 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005039
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005040Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005041-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005042
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00005043- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
5044 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
5045
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005046- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
5047 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
5048 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
5049 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
5050
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00005051- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
5052 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
5053 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
5054 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
5055
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00005056 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
5057 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
5058 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
5059 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
5060 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
5061 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
5062 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
5063 without losing information).
5064
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005065- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005066 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
5067 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
5068 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
5069 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
5070 module).
5071
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00005072 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005073 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
5074 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
5075 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
5076 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005077
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005078- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00005079 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
5080 encoding.
5081
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00005082- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
5083 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
5084
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005085- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005086 to allow saving the message body to a file.
5087
5088- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
5089 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
5090 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
5091 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
5092
5093- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
5094
5095- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
5096 ON, and OFF.
5097
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005098- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
5099 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
5100
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005101Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005102-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005103
5104- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
5105 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
5106 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005107
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005108- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
5109 been added: -X and -E.
5110
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005111Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005112-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005113
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005114- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
5115 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
5116
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005117C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005118-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005119
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00005120- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
5121 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
5122 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
5123 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
5124 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
5125
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00005126- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
5127 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
5128 as long) arguments.
5129
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005130- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
5131 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
5132 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
5133 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
5134 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
5135 report any bugs or strange behavior).
5136
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005137- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
5138 input.
5139
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005140New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005141-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005142
5143Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005144-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005145
5146Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005147-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005148
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00005149- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
5150 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
5151 is created for .py and .pyw files.
5152
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005153- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
5154 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
5155 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005156 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005157
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005158 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
5159 # (SIGINT) behavior.
5160 import signal
5161 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005162
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005163 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005164 while 1:
5165 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005166 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005167 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
5168 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
5169 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
5170 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005171
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005172
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005173What's New in Python 2.2a4?
5174===========================
5175
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005176*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
5177
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005178Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005179--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005180
5181- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
5182 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
5183 documentation for all operations on list objects.
5184
5185- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
5186 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
5187 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
5188 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
5189 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
5190 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
5191 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005192
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005193- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005194 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005195 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
5196 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
5197 associate a docstring with a property.
5198
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005199- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
5200 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5201 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5202 other built-in object types.
5203
5204- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5205 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5206 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5207 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5208 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5209
5210- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5211 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5212
5213- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5214 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005215 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005216 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5217 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5218 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5219 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5220 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5221
5222- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5223 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5224 class.
5225
5226- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5227 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5228 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5229 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5230
5231- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5232 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5233 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5234 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5235
5236- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5237 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5238
5239- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5240 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5241 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5242 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5243 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005244 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005245 with the same value as s.
5246
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005247- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5248
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005249Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005250----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005251
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005252- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5253
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005254- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5255 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5256 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5257 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5258 objects.
5259
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005260- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5261 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005262 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5263 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5264
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005265- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5266 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5267 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5268
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005269Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005270-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005271
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005272- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5273 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5274 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5275 by the instances.
5276
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005277- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5278 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5279 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5280
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005281- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5282 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5283 before the entire comparison is complete.
5284
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005285- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5286 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5287 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5288
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005289- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5290 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5291 getwriter().
5292
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005293- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5294 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5295
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005296- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005297 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5298 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5299
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005300- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5301 iterable object.
5302
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005303- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5304 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005305
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005306- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5307 authentication.
5308
5309- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5310 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005311
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005312- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005313 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5314 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5315 a sample driver.)
5316
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005317Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005318-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005319
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005320- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5321 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5322 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5323 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5324 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5325 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5326 kernel has large file support.
5327
5328- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5329 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5330 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5331 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5332 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5333
5334- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5335 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5336 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5337
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005338C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005339-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005340
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005341- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5342 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5343
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005344New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005345-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005346
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005347- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5348 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5349
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005350Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005351-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005352
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005353- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5354 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5355 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5356 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5357 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5358
5359- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5360 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5361 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5362 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5363
5364- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5365 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5366
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005367Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005368-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005369
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005370- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005371 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5372 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005373
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005374
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005375What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5376===========================
5377
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005378*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5379
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005380Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005381----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005382
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005383- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5384 big to represent as a C double.
5385
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005386- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5387 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5388 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5389 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5390 restriction).
5391
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005392- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5393 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5394 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5395 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5396 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5397
5398 >>> dir([])
5399 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5400 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5401 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5402 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5403 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5404 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5405 'reverse', 'sort']
5406
5407 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5408
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005409- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005410 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5411 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5412 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5413 OverflowError exception.
5414
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005415- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005416 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005417 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5418 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5419 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5420 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5421 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005422 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005423 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5424 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5425
5426 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5427 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5428 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5429 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005430
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005431- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005432 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5433 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5434 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5435 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5436 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5437 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5438 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5439 once it is created.
5440
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005441- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5442 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5443 (key, value) pairs.
5444
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005445- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005446 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5447 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5448
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005449- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5450 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5451 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5452 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5453 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005454
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005455- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005456 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5457 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5458
5459 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5460
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005461- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005462 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5463
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005464Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005465-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005466
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005467- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005468 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5469 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005470
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005471- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5472 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5473 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5474 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5475 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5476 in this area anymore).
5477
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005478- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5479 threading.Timer.
5480
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005481- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5482 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5483
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005484- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005485 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5486
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005487- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005488 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5489 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5490 converted to Python longs.
5491
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005492- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005493 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5494
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005495- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5496 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5497 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5498
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005499Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005500-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005501
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005502- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5503 division operators as per PEP 238.
5504
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005505Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005506-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005507
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005508- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5509 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5510 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5511 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5512
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005513C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005514-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005515
5516- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005517
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005518- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5519 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005520 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005521
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005522 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5523 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005524 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005525 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005526
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005527- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005528 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5529 module:
5530
5531 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005532
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005533 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5534 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005535
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005536 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5537 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005538
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005539 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5540
5541 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5542
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005543- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005544 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5545 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5546 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005547
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005548New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005549-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005550
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005551- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5552 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5553 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5554 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5555 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005556
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005557Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005558-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005559
5560Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005561-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005562
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005563- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5564 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5565 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5566 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005567 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5568 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5569 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5570 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5571 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005572
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005573- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005574 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5575
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005576
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005577What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5578===========================
5579
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005580*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5581
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005582Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005583-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005584
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005585- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5586 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5587
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005588- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5589 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5590 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005591
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005592- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5593 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5594 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5595 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005596
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005597- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5598
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005599- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005600
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005601Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005602-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005603
5604- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005605 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005606 the module docstring for details.
5607
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005608Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005609-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005610
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005611- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005612 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5613 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5614 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005615
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005616- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5617 Nick Mathewson.
5618
5619Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005620----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005621
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005622- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5623 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5624 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5625 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5626 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5627 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5628 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5629 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5630
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005631- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5632 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5633 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5634 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5635
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005636- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5637 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5638 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5639 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5640 come a long way).
5641
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005642- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5643 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5644 write filters for these warnings).
5645
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005646- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5647 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5648 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5649 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5650 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5651
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005652- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5653 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5654 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5655 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5656 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5657 older distribution.
5658
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005659Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005660-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005661
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005662- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5663 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005664 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005665
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005666- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5667 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5668 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5669
5670- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5671
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005672- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5673
5674- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5675
5676- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5677
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005678- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005679
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005680- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5681
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005682New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005683-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005684
5685C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005686-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005687
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005688- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5689 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5690 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5691 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5692 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5693 against buffer overruns.
5694
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005695- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005696 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5697 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005698 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5699 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5700 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5701
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005702- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5703 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5704 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5705 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5706 deprecated.
5707
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005708Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005709-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005710
5711- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5712 relevant is found.
5713
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005714
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005715What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005716===========================
5717
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005718*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5719
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005720Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005721----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005722
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005723- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5724 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5725 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5726 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5727 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5728 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5729 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5730 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005731 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005732 repaired.
5733
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005734- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005735 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005736 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5737 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5738 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5739 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5740 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5741 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5742 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5743 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5744
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005745- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5746 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5747 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5748 leading BMO character).
5749
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005750- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5751 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5752 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5753
5754 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5755 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5756 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005757
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005758 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5759 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5760 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5761 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5762 for various simple to use conversions.
5763
5764 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5765 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5766
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005767 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5768 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5769 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5770 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5771 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5772 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5773 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5774 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5775 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5776 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5777 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5778 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5779 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5780 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5781 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005782
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005783- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5784 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5785 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005786 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005787 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005788
5789 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005790 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5791 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5792 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5793 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5794 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005795 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5796 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005797
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005798 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5799 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5800 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005801 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005802
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005803- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5804 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5805 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5806 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5807 floating arithmetic,
5808
5809 x = 9007199254740992.0
5810 print long(x)
5811
5812 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5813 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5814 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5815 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5816 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5817 functions are of good quality).
5818
5819 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5820 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5821 algorithms to break.
5822
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005823- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5824 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5825 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5826 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5827 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5828 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5829 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5830 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5831 order.
5832
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005833- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5834 operation along the most common code paths.
5835
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005836- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5837 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5838
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005839- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5840 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5841 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5842 {}.update(UserDict())
5843
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005844- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5845 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5846 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5847 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5848 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5849 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5850 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5851 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5852
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005853- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005854 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005855
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005856 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005857 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5858 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005859 join() method of strings
5860 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005861 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5862 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005863 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005864 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005865
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005866- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5867 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5868
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005869- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5870 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5871
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005872- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5873 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5874 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5875 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5876
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005877- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5878 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005879 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005880 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5881 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005882
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005883- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5884
5885
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005886Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005887-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005888
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005889- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005890 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005891 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5892 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5893
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005894- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5895 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5896
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005897- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5898 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5899 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5900 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5901
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005902- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5903 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5904 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5905
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005906- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5907
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005908- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5909
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005910- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5911 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5912 that are still imported into string.py).
5913
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005914- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5915
5916- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5917 Now it does.
5918
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005919- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5920
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005921- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5922 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5923 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5924 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5925 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005926 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5927 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005928
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005929- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5930 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5931 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5932 'help(object)'.
5933
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005934Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005935-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005936
5937- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005938 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005939 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5940 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5941
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005942- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005943 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5944 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005945
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005946C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005947-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005948
5949- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5950 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005951
5952----
5953
5954**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**