blob: 570addacffd0ef05320100d7e7174b1a3ce2a166 [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10Core and builtins
11-----------------
12
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +000013- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
14 list.sort().
15
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000016
17Extension Modules
18-----------------
19
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +000020- array.array objects are now picklable.
21
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +000022- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
23 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
24
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +000025- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
26 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
27 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
28
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000029
30Library
31-------
32
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +000033- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
34 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
35 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
36 encoding alias table
37
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +000038- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
39
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +000040- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
41 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
42
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +000043- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
44
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +000045- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
46
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +000047- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
48
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +000049- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
50
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +000051- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
52
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +000053- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
54 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
55 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
56
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000057- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +000058 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000059
60
61Build
62-----
63
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +000064- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
65 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
66 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
67 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
68 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
69 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
70 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
71 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
72
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000073
74C API
75-----
76
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +000077- Removed PyRange_New().
78
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000079
80Tests
81-----
82
83
84Mac
85---
86
87
88
89Tools/Demos
90-----------
91
92
93
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +000094What's New in Python 2.4 final?
95===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +000096
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +000097*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +000098
99Core and builtins
100-----------------
101
102- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
103 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
104 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
105
106
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000107What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
108==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000109
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000110*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000111
112Core and builtins
113-----------------
114
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000115- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
116 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
117 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
118
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000119
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000120Library
121-------
122
123- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
124 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
125 raised is re-raised.
126
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000127- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
128 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
129
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000130- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
131 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
132 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
133 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
134 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
135 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
136 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
137 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
138 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
139 by the slice are recomputed now.
140
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000141- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000142
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000143Build
144-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000145
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000146- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
147 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
148 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000149
150C API
151-----
152
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000153- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
154
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000155
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000156What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
157================================
158
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000159*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000160
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000161License
162-------
163
164The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
165is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
166changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
167Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
168intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
169durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
170the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
171License::
172
173 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
174
175says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
176to Python 2.1.1.
177
178The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
179License Version 2.
180
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000181Core and builtins
182-----------------
183
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000184- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
185 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
186 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
187 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
188 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
189 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
190 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
191 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
192 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
193 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
194
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000195- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000196
197Extension Modules
198-----------------
199
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000200- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
201 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
202 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
203 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000204
205Library
206-------
207
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000208- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
209 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
210 returned.
211
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000212- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
213
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000214- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
215 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
216
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000217- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
218
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000219- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
220 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000221
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000222- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
223
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000224- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
225
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000226- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000227 the source code is updated and reloaded.
228
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000229Build
230-----
231
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000232- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000233
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000234What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
235================================
236
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000237*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000238
239Core and builtins
240-----------------
241
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000242- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000243 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
244
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000245- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
246 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
247 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
248 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
249
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000250- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
251 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
252
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000253- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
254 constant.
255
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000256- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
257 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
258 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
259 large), and to anomalies such as
260 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
261 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
262 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
263 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000264
265Extension modules
266-----------------
267
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000268- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
269 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000270 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
271 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
272 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000273
274Library
275-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000276
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000277- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000278 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000279 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
280 --swig-cpp.
281
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000282- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
283 it is set.
284
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000285- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000286
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000287- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
288 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
289 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
290 Closes bug #1039270.
291
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000292- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000293
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000294 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000295 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
296 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
297 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
298 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
299 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
300 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
301 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
302 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
303 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
304 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
305 + Updates to documentation.
306
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000307- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
308 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
309 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
310 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
311
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000312- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000313
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000314- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
315 applications should use the getmember function.
316
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000317- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
318
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000319- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
320 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
321 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
322 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
323 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
324 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
325 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
326 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
327 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
328
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000329- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
330 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000331 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000332
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000333- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
334 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
335 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
336 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
337 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
338 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
339 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
340 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000341
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000342- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
343 the new public features (of which there are many).
344
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000345- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000346 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
347 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
348 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
349 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000350 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000351
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000352- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
353
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000354- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
355 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
356 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
357 options.
358
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000359- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
360 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
361 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
362 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
363 conditions under which non-string values work.
364
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000365Build
366-----
367
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000368- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
369 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
370 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
371
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000372- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
373 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
374 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
375 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
376 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000377
378C API
379-----
380
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000381- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
382 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
383
384- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
385
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000386- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
387 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
388 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
389 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
390 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
391 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
392 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
393 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
394 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
395
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000396- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
397
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000398- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
399 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
400 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000401
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000402Tests
403-----
404
405- test__locale ported to unittest
406
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000407Mac
408---
409
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000410- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
411 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
412 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000413
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000414Tools/Demos
415-----------
416
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000417- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
418 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
419 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
420 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
421 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000422
423
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000424What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
425=================================
426
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000427*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000428
429Core and builtins
430-----------------
431
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000432- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000433 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
434
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000435- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
436 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
437 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
438 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
439 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
440 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
441 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
442 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000443 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
444 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
445 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
446 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
447 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000448
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000449- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
450 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
451 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
452 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
453 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
454
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000455- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
456
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000457- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
458 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
459
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000460- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
461 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
462 modified the list.
463
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000464- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
465 functions is now writable.
466
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000467- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
468 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
469 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
470 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
471
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000472- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
473 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
474 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
475 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
476 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000477
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000478- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
479 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
480
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000481Extension modules
482-----------------
483
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000484- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
485
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000486- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
487 data.
488
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000489- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
490 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
491 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
492 supposed to have been truncated away.
493
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000494- Added socket.socketpair().
495
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000496- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
497 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
498
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000499- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000500 versions of Python, have now been removed.
501
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000502Library
503-------
504
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000505- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000506 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000507
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000508- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
509 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
510
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000511- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
512 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
513
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000514- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
515
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000516- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
517 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000518
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000519- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
520 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
521
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000522- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
523
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000524- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
525
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000526- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
527
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000528- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
529 Percivall.
530
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000531- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
532 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
533
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000534- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
535 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
536 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000537 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000538
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000539- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
540 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
541 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
542 and exponent.
543
544- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
545
546- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
547 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
548 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
549
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000550- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
551 to the readline module.
552
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000553- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000554 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
555 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000556
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000557- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
558 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
559 contains symlinks.
560
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000561- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
562 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
563
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000564- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
565 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
566 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
567
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000568- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
569 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
570 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
571 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
572 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
573 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
574 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
575 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
576 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
577 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
578 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
579 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
580 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
581
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000582- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
583
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000584Tools/Demos
585-----------
586
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000587- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
588 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
589
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000590- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
591
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000592Build
593-----
594
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000595- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
596 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
597 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
598 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
599 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
600 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
601 plans to do so.
602
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000603- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
604 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
605
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000606- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
607 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
608
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000609- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
610 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
611
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000612- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
613 GNU/k*BSD systems.
614
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000615- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
616 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
617
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000618C API
619-----
620
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000621..
622
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000623Documentation
624-------------
625
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000626- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
627 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
628
629- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
630 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
631 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000632
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000633New platforms
634-------------
635
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000636- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
637
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000638Tests
639-----
640
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000641..
642
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000643Windows
644-------
645
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000646- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
647 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
648 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
649 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
650 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
651 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
652 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
653 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
654 the problem.
655
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000656Mac
657---
658
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000659..
660
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000661
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000662What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
663=================================
664
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000665*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000666
667Core and builtins
668-----------------
669
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000670- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
671 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
672 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
673 sensitive code.
674
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000675- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000676 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000677
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000678 @staticmethod
679 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000680
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000681 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000682
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000683- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
684 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
685 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
686 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
687 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
688 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
689 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
690 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
691 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
692 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
693 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
694
695 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
696 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
697 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
698 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
699 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
700 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
701 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
702
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000703- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
704 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
705
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000706- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000707 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000708
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000709- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000710 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000711 which was missing for no apparent reason.
712
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000713- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000714 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
715 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
716
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000717- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
718 types that support garbage collection.
719
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000720- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
721
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000722- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
723 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
724 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
725 Jython.
726
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000727- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
728
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000729- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
730 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
731
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000732- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
733 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
734 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000735
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000736- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
737 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
738 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
739
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000740Extension modules
741-----------------
742
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000743- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
744
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000745Library
746-------
747
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000748- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
749 TIS-620
750
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000751- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
752 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
753 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
754 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
755 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
756 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
757 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
758 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
759 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
760 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
761
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000762- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
763
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000764- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
765 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
766 same as when the argument is omitted).
767 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
768
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000769- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
770
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000771- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
772 schemes are offered.
773
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000774- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
775
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000776- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
777 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
778 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
779
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000780- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
781
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000782- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
783 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
784
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000785- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
786 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
787 when dummy_threading is being used.
788
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000789- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
790 from a tarfile.
791
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000792- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000793 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000794
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000795- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
796 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
797 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
798 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
799
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000800- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
801 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
802
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000803- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
804 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
805 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
806 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
807 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
808 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
809 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
810 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
811 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
812 by some other method in progress).
813
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000814- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
815 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
816 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000817
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000818- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
819
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000820- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
821 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
822 AM Kuchling.
823
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000824- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
825 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
826 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
827
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000828- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
829 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
830 instead of unsigned.
831
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000832- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000833 no longer part of the public API.
834
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000835- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
836 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
837 string methods of the same name).
838
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000839- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000840 SF patch 945642.
841
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000842- doctest unittest integration improvements:
843
844 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
845
846 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
847 DocTestSuites.
848
849- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
850 that provide thread-local data.
851
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000852- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
853 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
854
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000855- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
856
857- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
858 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
859 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
860
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000861- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
862
863 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
864 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
865 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000866
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000867 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
868 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
869 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
870 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
871
872 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
873 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
874
875 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
876 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
877 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
878 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
879
880 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
881 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
882 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
883 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
884 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
885
886 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
887 wrapping help output.
888
889 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
890 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
891 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000892
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000893C API
894-----
895
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000896- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
897 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
898 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
899 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
900 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
901 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
902 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
903 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
904 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
905 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
906 its visible semantics have not changed.
907
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000908- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
909 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
910
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000911Documentation
912-------------
913
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000914- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000915
916 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +0000917 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000918
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +0000919 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000920
921 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
922
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000923- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000924
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000925Tests
926-----
927
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000928- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000929 platforms that use the Makefile.
930
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000931- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
932 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
933 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
934
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000935
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000936What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
937=================================
938
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000939*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000940
941Core and builtins
942-----------------
943
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000944- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
945 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
946 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
947 objects now (one object instead of three).
948
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000949- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
950 Windows DLLs.
951
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +0000952- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
953 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000954
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000955- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
956 a new .pyc magic.
957
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000958- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
959 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
960 be there.
961
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000962- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
963 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
964 the LC_NUMERIC category.
965
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000966- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
967 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
968 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
969
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000970- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
971
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000972- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
973 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
974 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000975
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000976- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
977 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
978
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000979- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
980
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000981- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000982 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000983
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000984- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
985
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000986- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
987
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000988- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
989 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
990
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000991- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
992 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
993 Fixes bug #858016 .
994
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000995- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
996 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
997 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
998
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000999- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1000 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1001 improves their performance (about 35%).
1002
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001003- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1004 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1005 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1006
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001007- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1008 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1009 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1010 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1011
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001012- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1013 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
1014 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
1015 length is not known).
1016
1017- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1018 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001019 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1020 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001021 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1022
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001023- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1024 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1025
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001026- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1027 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1028 keyword arguments.
1029
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001030- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1031 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1032 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1033
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001034- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1035 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1036 cases.
1037
1038- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1039 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1040 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1041 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1042 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1043 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1044 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1045 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1046 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1047 a release build.
1048
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001049- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1050 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1051
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001052- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001053 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001054
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001055- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1056 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1057 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1058 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1059 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1060 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1061 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1062 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1063 destroyed.
1064
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001065- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1066 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1067 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1068 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1069 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1070 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1071 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1072 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1073
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001074- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1075 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1076 character other than a space.
1077
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001078- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1079 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1080 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1081 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1082 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1083 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1084 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1085 attributes with the same name.
1086
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001087- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1088 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1089 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1090 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1091 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1092 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1093 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1094 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1095 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1096 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1097 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1098 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1099 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1100 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001101
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001102- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1103 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1104 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1105 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1106 This has been repaired.
1107
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001108- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1109
1110- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1111
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001112- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1113 over a sequence.
1114
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001115- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001116 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001117
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001118- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1119
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001120- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1121 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1122 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1123 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1124 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1125 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1126 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1127 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1128
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001129- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1130 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1131 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1132
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001133- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1134 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1135 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1136 freelist.
1137
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001138- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1139 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1140
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001141- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1142 number.
1143
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001144- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1145 a TypeError exception.
1146
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001147- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1148 820195.
1149
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001150- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1151 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1152 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1153
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001154- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001155 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1156 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001157
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001158- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1159 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1160 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1161
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001162- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1163 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001164 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001165
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001166- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001167 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1168 the first call.
1169
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001170
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001171Extension modules
1172-----------------
1173
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001174- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1175 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1176
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001177- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1178 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1179 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1180 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1181 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1182 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1183 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001184
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001185- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1186
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001187- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1188
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001189- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1190 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1191
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001192- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1193 fewer false positives.
1194
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001195- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1196 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1197
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001198- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001199 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1200
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001201- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001202 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001203 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001204 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1205 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001206
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001207- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1208 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1209 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1210 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1211
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001212- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1213 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1214 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1215 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1216 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1217 #897625.
1218
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001219- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1220 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1221
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001222- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1223 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1224 and pops on either side of the deque.
1225
1226- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1227 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1228
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001229- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1230 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1231 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1232 other functions that expect a function argument.
1233
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001234- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1235
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001236- os.getsid was added.
1237
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001238- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1239 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1240 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1241
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001242- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1243
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001244- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1245
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001246- readline.clear_history was added.
1247
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001248- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1249
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001250- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1251
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001252- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1253
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001254- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1255
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001256- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1257
1258- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1259
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001260- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1261
1262- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1263
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001264- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1265 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1266 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1267
1268- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1269 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1270 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1271 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1272 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1273 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1274 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1275
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001276- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1277 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1278 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1279 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001280
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001281- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001282 iterators from a single iterable.
1283
1284- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1285 of raising a TypeError exception.
1286
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001287- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1288 as parameter.
1289
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001290Library
1291-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001292
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001293- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1294 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1295 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001296
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001297- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1298 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1299 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001300
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001301- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001302
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001303- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1304 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001305
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001306- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1307 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1308
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001309- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1310
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001311- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001312 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001313
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001314- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001315 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001316
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001317- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1318
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001319- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1320 on cygwin and mingw32.
1321
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001322- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1323
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001324- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1325 module.
1326
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001327- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1328 installation scheme for all platforms.
1329
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001330- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001331 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001332
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001333- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1334 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1335 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1336
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001337- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1338 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1339 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1340
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001341- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1342
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001343- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1344
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001345- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1346 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1347
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001348- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1349 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1350 type pattern with the same value exists.
1351
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001352- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1353 when run from the command prompt).
1354
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001355- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1356 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1357
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001358- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1359 default sort).
1360
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001361- Added global runctx function to profile module
1362
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001363- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1364
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001365- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1366
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001367- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1368
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001369- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001370 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1371 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1372 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1373 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1374 accordingly.
1375
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001376- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1377 decoding standards.
1378
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001379- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1380 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1381 called for all requests.
1382
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001383- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1384 they are passed to the compiler.
1385
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001386- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1387 indent, width and depth.
1388
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001389- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1390 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1391
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001392- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1393 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1394
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001395- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1396
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001397- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1398
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001399- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1400
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001401- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1402 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1403
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001404- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001405 for better performance.
1406
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001407- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001408
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001409- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1410 a string).
1411
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001412- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1413
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001414- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1415
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001416- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1417
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001418- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1419
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001420- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1421 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1422 list of fieldnames.
1423
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001424- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1425 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1426
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001427- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1428
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001429- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1430 empty lists.
1431
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001432- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1433 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1434 and shelves.
1435
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001436- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1437 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1438
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001439- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001440 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1441 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001442
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001443- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1444 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001445 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001446
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001447- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001448 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1449 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1450
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001451- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1452 and removed in Py2.4.
1453
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001454- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1455
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001456- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1457
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001458Tools/Demos
1459-----------
1460
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001461- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1462 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1463
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001464- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1465
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001466- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1467 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1468 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1469 destination in situations where both files are given.
1470
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001471- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1472 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1473 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1474 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1475
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001476- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1477
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001478- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1479 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1480 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1481 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1482 now.
1483
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001484- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1485 in effect
1486
1487- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1488 C-c C-h
1489
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001490- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1491 -d option was given.
1492
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001493Build
1494-----
1495
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001496- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1497 build under OS X.
1498
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001499- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1500 --enable-profiling.
1501
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001502- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1503 is configured --with-tsc.
1504
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001505- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1506 on AMD64.
1507
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001508- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1509 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1510
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001511- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1512 removed.
1513
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001514- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1515 supported (see PEP 11).
1516
1517- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1518
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001519- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1520
1521- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1522 (see PEP 11).
1523
1524- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1525 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1526
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001527C API
1528-----
1529
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001530- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1531 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1532 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1533
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001534- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1535 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1536 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1537 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1538
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001539- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1540 generator objects.
1541
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001542- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1543 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001544 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1545 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001546
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001547- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1548 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1549
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001550- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1551 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1552 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1553 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1554 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1555
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001556- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1557 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1558 about 10% faster.
1559
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001560- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1561 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1562
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001563- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1564 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1565 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1566 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1567
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001568Windows
1569-------
1570
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001571- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1572 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1573 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1574 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1575
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001576- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1577 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1578 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1579
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001580
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001581What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1582===============================
1583
1584*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1585
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001586IDLE
1587----
1588
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001589- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1590 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1591 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1592 context-menu actions.
1593
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001594- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1595 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1596 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1597 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1598 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1599 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1600 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1601 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1602 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1603
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001604
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001605What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1606=============================================
1607
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001608*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001609
1610Core and builtins
1611-----------------
1612
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001613- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001614 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001615 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1616
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001617Extension modules
1618-----------------
1619
1620- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1621 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1622 than once. This has been fixed.
1623
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001624- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1625 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1626 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1627 call.
1628
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001629- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1630
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001631Library
1632-------
1633
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001634- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1635 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1636
1637- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1638 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1639 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1640 restored.
1641
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001642IDLE
1643----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001644
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001645- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001646
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001647Build
1648-----
1649
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001650- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1651 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1652
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001653C API
1654-----
1655
1656Windows
1657-------
1658
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001659- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1660 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1661
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001662- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1663
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001664Mac
1665---
1666
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001667- Various fixes to pimp.
1668
1669- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1670
1671- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1672 more problems than it solves.
1673
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001674
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001675What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1676=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001677
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001678*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1679
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001680Core and builtins
1681-----------------
1682
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001683- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1684 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1685
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001686- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1687 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001688 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001689
1690- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1691 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1692 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001693 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001694
1695- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1696 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001697
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001698- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1699 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1700 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1701
1702- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001703 770247.
1704
1705- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001706
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001707Extension modules
1708-----------------
1709
1710- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1711 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1712
1713- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1714
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001715- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1716
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001717- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1718 contained within the _strptime module.
1719
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001720- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1721 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1722
1723- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001724 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1725
1726- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1727 the find_class attribute, if present.
1728
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001729- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001730
1731 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1732 (SF bug 763298).
1733
1734 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001735 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1736 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1737 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001738
1739 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1740
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001741Library
1742-------
1743
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001744- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1745
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001746- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1747 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1748 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1749 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1750 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1751 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1752 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1753 or Tester().
1754
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001755- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1756 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1757 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1758 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1759 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1760 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1761 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1762 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1763 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001764
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001765 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001766
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001767- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1768 weren't before was an oversight.
1769
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001770- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1771 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1772
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001773- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1774 when there are no lines.
1775
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001776- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1777 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1778
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001779- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1780 to child processes.
1781
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001782- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1783
1784- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1785
1786- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1787 xmlrpclib.
1788
1789- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1790 responses.
1791
1792- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1793 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1794
1795- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1796 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1797 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1798
1799- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1800 used as patterns.
1801
1802- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1803 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1804 than Tk 8.3.
1805
1806- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1807
1808- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001809
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001810Tools/Demos
1811-----------
1812
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001813- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1814
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001815- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1816
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001817- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001818
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001819Build
1820-----
1821
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001822- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1823
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001824- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1825
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001826- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1827 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001828
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001829- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1830 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1831 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001832
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001833C API
1834-----
1835
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001836- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1837 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1838
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001839Windows
1840-------
1841
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001842- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1843 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1844 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1845 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1846 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1847 Python exception ::
1848
1849 thread.error: can't start new thread
1850
1851 is raised now.
1852
1853- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1854 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1855 instead of from DLL teardown.
1856
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001857Mac
1858---
1859
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001860- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001861 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001862 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1863 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1864 the executable in the bundle.
1865
1866- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001867
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001868- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1869
1870- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1871 on Panther.
1872
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001873What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1874================================
1875
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001876*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001877
1878Core and builtins
1879-----------------
1880
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001881- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1882 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1883 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1884 with the -i option.
1885
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001886- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1887 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1888
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001889- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1890 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1891
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001892- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1893 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1894 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1895 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1896 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1897 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1898 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1899 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1900 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1901 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1902 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1903 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1904 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001905
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001906- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1907 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1908 embedded in a lambda expression.
1909
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001910- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1911 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1912 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1913 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1914 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1915
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001916- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1917 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1918 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1919
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001920- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1921 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1922
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001923- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1924 It's writable again.
1925
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001926- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1927 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1928 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001929 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001930
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001931- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1932 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1933 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1934
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001935Extension modules
1936-----------------
1937
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001938- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1939 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1940
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001941- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1942 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1943 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1944 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1945
1946- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1947 collection.
1948
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001949- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1950 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1951 unique within a single program run.
1952
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001953- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1954 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1955
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001956- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1957 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1958
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001959- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1960 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001961
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001962- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1963
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001964- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1965 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1966
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001967- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1968 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1969 for many BSD-derived systems.
1970
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001971
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001972Library
1973-------
1974
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001975- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1976 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1977 primary ones:
1978
1979 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1980 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1981 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1982
1983 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1984 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1985 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1986 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1987 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1988 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1989
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001990- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1991 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1992 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1993 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1994 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1995 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1996 argument.
1997
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001998- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1999 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2000 in the archive.
2001
2002- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2003 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2004
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002005- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2006 569574).
2007
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002008- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2009 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2010 no more.
2011
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002012- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2013 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2014 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2015 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2016 code coverage.
2017
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002018- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2019 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2020 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002021 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2022 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002023
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002024- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2025 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2026 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002027 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002028
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002029- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2030
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002031- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2032 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2033 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2034 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2035
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002036- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2037 handling.
2038
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002039- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2040 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2041
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002042- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2043 in socket.py.
2044
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002045- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2046
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002047- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2048 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2049 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2050 opener with proxy support.
2051
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002052- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2053
2054- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2055
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002056Tools/Demos
2057-----------
2058
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002059- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2060
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002061- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2062
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002063- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2064 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002065
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002066- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2067 files.
2068
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002069Build
2070-----
2071
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002072- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002073 different root directory.
2074
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002075C API
2076-----
2077
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002078- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2079 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2080 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2081 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2082 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2083 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2084 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2085 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2086 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2087 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2088
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002089- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2090 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2091 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2092 from Python.
2093
2094
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002095New platforms
2096-------------
2097
2098None this time.
2099
2100Tests
2101-----
2102
2103- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2104 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2105
2106Windows
2107-------
2108
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002109- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2110
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002111- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2112 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2113 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2114 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2115 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2116 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2117 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2118 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2119 that's what it's for.
2120
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002121Mac
2122---
2123
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002124- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2125 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2126 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2127 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002128- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2129 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2130- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002131
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002132SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2133------------------------------------
2134
2135430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2136598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2137622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2138661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2139683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2140697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2141713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2142724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2143727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2144729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2145730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2146731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2147732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2148733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2149735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2150740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2151744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2152745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2153747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2154749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2155751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2156753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2157755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2158757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2159760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2160
2161
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002162What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2163================================
2164
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002165*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002166
2167Core and builtins
2168-----------------
2169
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002170- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2171 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2172
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002173- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2174 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2175 and cannot be strings).
2176
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002177- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2178 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2179 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2180 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2181
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002182- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2183 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2184 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2185 Python itself.
2186
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002187- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2188 the referenced object, if it has one.
2189
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002190- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2191 the thread started at
2192 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2193
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002194- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2195 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2196 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2197 placed on a list index.
2198
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002199- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2200 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2201 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2202 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2203
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002204- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2205 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2206 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2207 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2208 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2209 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2210 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2211
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002212- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2213 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2214 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2215 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2216 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2217
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002218- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2219 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002220
2221- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2222 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2223 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2224 #693195.)
2225
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002226- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2227 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002228
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002229- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002230 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002231 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2232 interpreter executions, would fail.
2233
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002234- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002235 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002236 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002237
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002238Extension modules
2239-----------------
2240
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002241- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2242 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2243 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2244 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2245
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002246- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2247 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2248
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002249- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2250 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2251 and Greg Chapman.)
2252
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002253- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2254 recursively.
2255
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002256- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002257 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2258 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2259 leaks.
2260
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002261- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2262
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002263- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2264 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2265 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2266 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2267 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2268 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2269 #705836.
2270
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002271- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002272 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2273
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002274- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2275 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2276 See SF bug #692416.
2277
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002278- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2279 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2280
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002281- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2282 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2283 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002284
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002285- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002286 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2287 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2288
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002289- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2290 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2291 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2292 timeouts to work properly.
2293
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002294Library
2295-------
2296
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002297- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2298 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2299 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2300 future release.
2301
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002302- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2303 for querying platform dependent features.
2304
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002305- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002306
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002307- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2308 pickle protocol versions.
2309
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002310- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2311 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2312 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2313
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002314- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2315
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002316- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2317 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2318 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2319 modules.
2320
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002321- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2322 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2323 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2324
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002325- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2326 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2327
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002328- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2329 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2330 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2331
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002332- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002333 MS Office extensions.
2334
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002335- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2336 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2337
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002338- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2339 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2340
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002341- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2342 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2343 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2344 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2345 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2346 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2347
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002348- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2349 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2350 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002351
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002352- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2353 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2354 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2355
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002356- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2357
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002358- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2359 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2360 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2361
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002362Tools/Demos
2363-----------
2364
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002365- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2366 See the module docstring for details.
2367
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002368Build
2369-----
2370
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002371- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2372 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002373
2374C API
2375-----
2376
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002377- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2378
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002379- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2380 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2381 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2382
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002383- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2384 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002385
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002386 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2387 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2388 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002389
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002390- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002391 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2392
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002393- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2394 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2395 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002396
2397New platforms
2398-------------
2399
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002400None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002401
2402Tests
2403-----
2404
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002405- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2406 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002407
2408Windows
2409-------
2410
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002411- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2412 function.
2413
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002414- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2415 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002416
2417Mac
2418---
2419
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002420- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2421 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002422
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002423- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2424 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002425
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002426- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2427 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2428 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002429
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002430- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002431 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2432 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002433
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002434- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2435 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002436
2437
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002438What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2439=================================
2440
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002441*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002442
2443Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002444-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002445
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002446- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2447 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2448 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2449
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002450- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2451 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2452 (SF patch #664376.)
2453
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002454- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2455 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2456 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2457 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2458 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2459 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002460 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002461
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002462- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2463 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2464 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2465 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002466 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002467
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002468- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2469 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2470 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2471 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2472 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2473 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2474 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2475 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2476 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2477 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2478 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2479
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002480- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2481 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2482 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2483 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2484 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2485 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2486
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002487- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2488 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2489
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002490- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2491 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2492 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2493 case.)
2494
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002495- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2496 passed as unicode strings.
2497
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002498- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2499 See SF bug #683467.
2500
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002501- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2502 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2503
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002504- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2505
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002506- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2507
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002508- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2509 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2510 arguments.
2511
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002512- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2513 See SF bug #667147.
2514
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002515- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002516 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002517 See SF bug #676155.
2518
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002519- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002520 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002521 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2522 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2523 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2524 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2525 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2526 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002527
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002528Extension modules
2529-----------------
2530
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002531- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2532 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2533 tp_as_number pointer.
2534
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002535- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2536 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2537 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2538 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2539 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2540
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002541- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2542
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002543- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2544
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002545- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002546 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002547 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2548 patch #678531.)
2549
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002550- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2551 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2552
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002553- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2554 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2555
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002556- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2557
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002558- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2559 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2560 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2561
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002562- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2563
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002564- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2565 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2566
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002567- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002568
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002569- datetime changes:
2570
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002571 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2572
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002573 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2574 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2575 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2576 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2577 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2578 now.
2579
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002580 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002581 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2582 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002583
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002584 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002585 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002586 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2587 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2588 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2589 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002590
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002591 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2592 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2593 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002594 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2595
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002596 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2597 by a later example coded by Guido.
2598
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002599 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002600 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2601 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2602 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002603 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2604 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2605
2606 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2607 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2608 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2609 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2610 tzinfo subclass instance.
2611
2612 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2613 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2614 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2615 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2616 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2617 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2618 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2619 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002620
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002621 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2622 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2623 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2624 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2625 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002626 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2627
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002628 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002629
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002630 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2631 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2632 as a naive datetime object.
2633
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002634 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2635 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2636 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2637
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002638 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2639 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2640 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2641 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2642 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2643 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2644 comparison.
2645
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002646 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2647 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2648 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2649 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002650 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002651
2652 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002653
2654 and ::
2655
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002656 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2657
2658 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2659 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2660 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2661 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2662
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002663 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2664 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2665 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2666 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2667 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2668
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002669 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2670 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002671 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2672 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002673
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002674Library
2675-------
2676
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002677- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2678 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2679
2680- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2681 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2682 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2683 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2684 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2685 See PEP 307 for details.
2686
2687- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2688 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2689
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002690- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2691 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002692 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002693 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2694 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002695 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002696
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002697- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2698 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2699
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002700- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2701 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2702 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2703
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002704- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2705
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002706- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2707 exception.
2708
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002709- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2710 class.
2711
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002712- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2713 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2714 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2715
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002716- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2717 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2718
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002719- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002720 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2721 See SF bug #659228.
2722
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002723- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2724 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2725 See SF patch #651082.
2726
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002727- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002728
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002729- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2730 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2731
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002732- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002733 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002734
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002735- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2736 DOS paths from other platforms.
2737
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002738Tools/Demos
2739-----------
2740
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002741- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2742 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2743 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2744 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2745 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2746 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2747 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2748 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2749 example:
2750
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002751 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2752 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002753
2754 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2755
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002756
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002757Build
2758-----
2759
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002760- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2761 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2762 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002763 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2764
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002765 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2766
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002767- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2768 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2769 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2770 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2771 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2772 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2773 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2774 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2775 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2776
2777- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2778 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2779 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2780 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2781
2782- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2783 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2784
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002785C API
2786-----
2787
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002788- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2789 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002790
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002791- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2792 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2793 tp_as_number pointer.
2794
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002795- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2796 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2797 (SF #681367)
2798
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002799- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2800 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2801 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2802 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002803
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002804Tests
2805-----
2806
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002807- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002808 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2809 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2810 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2811 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2812 pydoc.)
2813
2814- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2815
2816- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002817
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002818Windows
2819-------
2820
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002821- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2822 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2823 time).
2824
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002825- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2826 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2827
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002828- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2829 release without strong cryptography.
2830
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002831- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002832 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002833
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002834- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2835 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2836
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002837Mac
2838---
2839
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002840- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2841 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002842
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002843- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2844 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2845 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002846
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002847- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2848 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002849
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002850- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2851 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2852 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2853 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002854
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002855- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002856 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2857 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2858 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002859
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002860
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002861What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002862=================================
2863
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002864*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002865
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002866Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002867--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002868
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002869- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2870
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002871- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2872 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002873 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002874 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002875 a different meaning than before.
2876
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002877- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002878 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002879 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002880
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002881- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002882 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002883 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002884
2885- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2886 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2887 and deallocation.
2888
2889- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2890 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2891
2892- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2893 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2894 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2895 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2896 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2897
2898- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2899 now detected by the garbage collector.
2900
2901- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2902 [SF bug 519621]
2903
2904- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2905 identifier.
2906
2907- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2908 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2909 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2910 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2911 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2912 [SF bug 563060]
2913
2914- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2915 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2916 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2917 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2918 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2919
2920- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2921 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2922 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2923
2924- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2925
2926- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2927 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2928 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2929 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2930 state of the slots would be lost.)
2931
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002932Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002933-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002934
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002935- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002936 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2937 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2938 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2939 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002940 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2941 Jython 2.1.
2942
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002943- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002944 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002945 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2946 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2947 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2948 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2949 these, see PEP 302.
2950
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002951- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2952 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2953 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2954
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002955- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2956 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2957 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2958
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002959- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2960 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2961 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2962
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002963- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2964 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2965 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2966 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2967 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2968 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2969 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2970 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2971 releases or implementations.
2972
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002973- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002974 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2975 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002976
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002977- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2978 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2979
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002980- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2981 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2982 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2983
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002984- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2985 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2986
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002987- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2988 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002989 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2990 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002991
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002992- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2993 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2994 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2995 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2996 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2997
2998 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2999 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3000 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3001 pattern.
3002
3003 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3004 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3005 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3006 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3007
3008 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3009 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3010 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3011 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3012 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3013 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3014
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003015- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3016 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3017 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3018 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3019 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3020 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3021 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3022 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003023
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003024- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3025 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3026 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3027 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3028 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003029 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3030 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3031 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3032 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3033 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3034 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3035 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003036
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003037- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3038 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3039
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003040- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3041 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3042 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3043 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3044 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3045 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3046 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3047 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3048 to Zack Weinberg!
3049
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003050- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3051 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3052 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3053 type. This has been fixed now.
3054
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003055- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3056 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3057 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3058
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003059- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3060 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3061 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3062 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3063 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3064 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3065 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3066 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003067 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003068
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003069- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3070 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3071 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003072
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003073- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3074 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3075 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3076 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3077 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3078 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3079 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3080 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003081 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003082 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3083 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3084
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003085- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3086 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3087 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3088 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3089 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3090 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3091 this.)
3092
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003093- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3094 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003095 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003096 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003097 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3098 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003099 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3100 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003101
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003102- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3103 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3104 currently running.
3105
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003106- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3107 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3108 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3109 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3110
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003111- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3112 as directory names.
3113
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003114- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3115 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3116
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003117- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3118 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3119
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003120- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003121 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3122 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003123
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003124- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3125 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3126 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3127 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3128 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3129
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003130- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3131 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3132 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3133 removed.
3134
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003135- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3136 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3137 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3138
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003139- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3140 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3141 to __debug__.
3142
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003143- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3144 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3145 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3146
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003147- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3148 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3149 deprecated now.
3150
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003151- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3152 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3153 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003154
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003155- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3156 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3157 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3158 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3159 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003160
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003161- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3162 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3163
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003164- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3165 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3166 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003167 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003168 is backward compatible.
3169
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003170- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3171 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3172 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3173 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3174 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3175
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003176- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3177 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3178 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3179 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3180 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3181 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003182
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003183- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3184 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3185
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003186- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3187 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3188
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003189- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3190 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3191 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3192 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3193 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3194
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003195- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3196 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3197 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3198
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003199- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003200 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3201
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003202- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3203 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3204 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003205
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003206- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3207 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3208
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003209- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3210 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3211 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3212
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003213- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3214
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003215Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003216-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003217
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003218- Added three operators to the operator module:
3219 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3220 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3221 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3222
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003223- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3224
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003225- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3226 archives.
3227
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003228- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3229 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3230 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3231
3232 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3233
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003234- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3235 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3236 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003237 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003238
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003239- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3240 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3241 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3242 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003243 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3244 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3245 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3246 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003247
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003248- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3249 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003250
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003251- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3252
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003253- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3254 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3255
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003256- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3257 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3258 supported.
3259
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003260- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3261
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003262- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3263 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003264
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003265- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3266 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3267
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003268- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3269
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003270- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3271 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3272
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003273- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3274 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3275 functions but callable type objects.
3276
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003277- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003278 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003279 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003280
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003281- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3282 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003283
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003284- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3285 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003286
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003287- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3288 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3289 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3290 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3291
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003292- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3293 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003294
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003295- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3296 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3297 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3298 and __imul__.
3299
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003300- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003301 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3302 is called.
3303
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003304- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3305 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3306 interpreter was compiled.
3307
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003308- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3309 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3310 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003311 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003312 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3313 1, not 2.
3314
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003315- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3316 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3317 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3318 limit.
3319
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003320- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3321 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3322 bug #623464.
3323
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003324- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3325 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3326 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3327 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3328
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003329Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003330-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003331
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003332- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3333
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003334- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3335 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3336 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3337 with Python 2.3a2.
3338
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003339- os.path exposes getctime.
3340
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003341- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003342 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003343 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003344 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003345 unit tests of floating point results.
3346
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003347- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3348 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3349 has been increased.
3350
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003351- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3352 executed.
3353
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003354- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3355 postinstallation script.
3356
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003357- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3358 test the current module.
3359
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003360- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003361 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3362 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3363 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3364 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3365
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003366- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003367 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003368 Ward's Optik package.
3369
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003370- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3371 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3372 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3373 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3374
3375- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3376 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003377 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003378
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003379- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3380 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3381 shelf are binary pickles.
3382
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003383- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3384 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3385
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003386- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3387 modules are iterators now.
3388
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003389- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3390 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3391 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3392 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3393 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3394 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003395
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003396- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3397 with their entity value.
3398
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003399- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3400
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003401- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3402 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003403
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003404- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3405 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003406 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003407
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003408- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3409 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3410 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3411 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3412 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3413 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3414 main():
3415
3416 import locale
3417 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3418
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003419- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3420 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3421
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003422- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3423 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3424 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3425 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3426 to the new standard.
3427
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003428- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3429 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3430 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3431 an extension to the database.
3432
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003433- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3434 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3435 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3436 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003437 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003438
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003439- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003440 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003441
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003442- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3443 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3444 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3445 bounded integers.
3446
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003447- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3448 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3449 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3450 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3451 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3452 in existence.
3453
3454 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3455 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3456 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3457 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3458 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3459 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3460
3461 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3462 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3463 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3464 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3465
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003466- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3467 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3468 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3469
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003470- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3471
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003472- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3473 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3474 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3475 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3476
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003477- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3478 argument.
3479
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003480- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3481 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3482 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3483 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3484 [SF patch 560794].
3485
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003486- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3487 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3488 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003489 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3490 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3491 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003492
3493- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3494 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003495
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003496- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3497 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3498 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3499 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003500
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003501- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3502 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3503 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3504 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3505 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3506
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003507- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003508
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003509- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3510
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003511- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3512 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3513 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3514 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3515 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3516 identical to None.
3517
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003518- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3519 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3520 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3521 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3522 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3523 results now.
3524
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003525- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3526 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3527
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003528- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3529 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3530 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3531 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3532 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3533 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3534 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3535 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3536
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003537- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3538
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003539- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3540 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3541
3542- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3543 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3544 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3545 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3546 and other systems.
3547
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003548- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3549 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3550 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3551 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 +00003552 work well with these.
3553
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003554- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3555
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003556- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003557 connections.
3558
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003559- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3560 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3561 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3562
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003563- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3564 sets
3565
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003566- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3567 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3568 name.
3569
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003570- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3571 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3572 passed in.
3573
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003574- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003575 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003576 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3577 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003578
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003579- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3580
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003581- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3582
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003583- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3584 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3585 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3586
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003587- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3588 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3589 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3590 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003591 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003592
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003593- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003594 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003595 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003596
3597- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3598 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3599 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3600
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003601- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003602 the value of its expression argument.
3603
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003604- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3605 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3606 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3607
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003608- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3609 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3610 skipstone browser was included.
3611
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003612- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3613 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3614
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003615Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003616-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003617
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003618- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3619 names in addition to accepting file names.
3620
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003621- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3622 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3623 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3624 still used and useful.)
3625
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003626- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3627 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3628 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3629 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003630
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003631- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3632 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3633 the generated binary.
3634
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003635Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003636-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003637
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003638- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3639
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003640- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3641 except in the hands of experts.
3642
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003643- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003644 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3645 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3646 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003647
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003648- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3649 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3650 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3651 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3652 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3653 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3654 builds.
3655
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003656- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3657 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3658 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3659 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3660 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3661 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3662 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3663 new type.
3664
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003665- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003666
3667 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3668 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3669 positive infinities.
3670
3671 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3672 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3673 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3674 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3675 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3676 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3677 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3678
3679 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3680
3681 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3682
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003683- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3684 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3685 size of the executable.
3686
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003687- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3688 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3689 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3690 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003691
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003692- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3693
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003694- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3695 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3696 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003697
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003698- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3699 well as Unix.
3700
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003701- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3702 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3703 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3704 modules in the README file for details.
3705
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003706C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003707-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003708
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003709- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3710 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003711 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003712 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003713 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003714
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003715- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3716 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3717 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3718 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3719 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3720 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003721 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003722 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3723 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3724 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3725 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3726 aligned.)
3727
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003728- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3729 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3730 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3731
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003732- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3733 level.
3734
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003735- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3736 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3737 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3738 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3739 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3740
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003741- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3742 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3743 code.
3744
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003745- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3746 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3747 adjusting for negative indices.
3748
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003749- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3750 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3751 object.
3752
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003753- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3754 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3755 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3756
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003757- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3758 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003759
3760- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3761
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003762- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3763 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3764 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3765 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3766
3767- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3768
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003769- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003770
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003771- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003772 without going through the buffer API.
3773
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003774- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003775
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003776- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3777 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3778 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3779 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3780
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003781- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3782 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3783
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003784- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003785 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3786
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003787New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003788-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003789
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003790- OpenVMS is now supported.
3791
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003792- AtheOS is now supported.
3793
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003794- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3795
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003796- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3797
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003798Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003799-----
3800
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003801- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3802 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3803 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003804
3805Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003806-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003807
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003808- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3809 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3810 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3811 bugs.
3812 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003813 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003814 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3815 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003816 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003817
3818- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003819 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003820
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003821- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3822 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3823
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003824- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3825 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003826 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003827 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3828
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003829- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3830 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3831 use files" uninstall option).
3832
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003833- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3834
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003835- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3836 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3837
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003838- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3839 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3840 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3841
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003842- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3843 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3844 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3845 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3846 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003847 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3848 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3849 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003850
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003851- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003852 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003853 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3854 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3855 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3856 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3857 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3858 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3859 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3860 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3861 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3862 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3863 work around.
3864
3865- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3866 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3867 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3868 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3869 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3870 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3871 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3872 specified with O_CREAT too).
3873
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003874Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003875----
3876
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003877- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003878
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003879- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3880 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3881 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3882
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003883- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3884 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3885 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3886
3887- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3888 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3889 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3890 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3891 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3892 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3893 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3894 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003895
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003896- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3897 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3898 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003899
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003900- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3901 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3902 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3903 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3904 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003905
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003906- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3907 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3908 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003909
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003910- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3911 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003912
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003913- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3914 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3915 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3916 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3917 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003918
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003919- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3920 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3921 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3922
3923- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3924 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3925 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003926
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003927- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3928 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3929 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3930 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003931 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003932
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003933- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3934 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003935
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003936- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3937 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003938
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003939- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003940 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003941 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3942 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003943
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003944
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003945What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003946===============================
3947
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003948*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3949
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003950Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003951--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003952
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003953- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3954 with a custom metaclass.
3955
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003956Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003957-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003958
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003959- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3960 are proxies.
3961
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003962Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003963-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003964
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003965- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3966 very short strings.
3967
3968- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3969 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3970 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3971 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3972 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3973
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003974Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003975-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003976
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003977- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3978 close or delete time).
3979
3980- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3981 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3982
3983- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3984
3985- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003986 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003987
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003988Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003989-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003990
3991Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003992-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003993
3994C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003995-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003996
3997New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003998-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003999
4000Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004001-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004002
4003Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004004-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004005
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004006- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4007
4008- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4009 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4010
4011- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4012 deleted at process exit time.
4013
4014- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4015 in backslash.
4016
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004017Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004018----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004019
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004020- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4021 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4022 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4023
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004024
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004025What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004026===========================
4027
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004028*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4029
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004030Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004031--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004032
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004033- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4034 been extensively updated. See
4035
4036 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4037
4038 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4039
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004040- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4041 deleted!
4042
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004043- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4044 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4045 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4046 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4047 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4048
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004049- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4050
4051 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4052 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4053
4054 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4055 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4056 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4057 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4058 supported anyway.
4059
4060 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4061 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4062
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004063- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4064 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4065 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4066 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4067 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004068
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004069- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4070 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4071 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4072
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004073Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004074-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004075
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004076- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4077 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4078 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4079 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4080 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4081 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004082 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4083 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4084 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4085 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004086
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004087- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4088 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4089 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4090
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004091Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004092-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004093
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004094- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4095
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004096Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004097-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004098
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004099- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4100 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4101 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4102 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4103 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4104 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4105
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004106- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4107
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004108- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4109
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004110- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4111
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004112- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4113 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4114 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4115
4116- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4117
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004118Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004119-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004120
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004121- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4122 off a search on Google.
4123
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004124Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004125-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004126
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004127- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4128 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4129 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4130 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4131 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4132 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4133 other platforms should do likewise.
4134
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004135- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4136 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4137 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4138
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004139C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004140-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004141
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004142- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4143 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4144 producing key-value pairs.
4145
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004146- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004147 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004148 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4149 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4150 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4151 previously went unchallenged.
4152
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004153New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004154-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004155
4156Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004157-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004158
4159Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004160-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004161
4162Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004163----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004164
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004165- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4166 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004167
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004168- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4169 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4170 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4171 home.
4172
4173
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004174What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004175===========================
4176
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004177*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4178
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004179Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004180--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004181
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004182- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4183 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004184
4185 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004186 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004187
4188 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4189 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004190 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004191 This needs to be documented.
4192
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004193- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4194 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4195
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004196- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4197 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4198 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4199
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004200- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4201 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4202
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004203- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4204 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4205 class forbids it).
4206
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004207- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4208 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4209 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4210
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004211- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4212
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004213Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004214-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004215
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004216- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4217 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004218 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004219
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004220- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4221 (like 1 + '').
4222
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004223Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004224-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004225
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004226- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4227 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4228 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4229 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004230 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004231 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4232
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004233- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4234 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4235 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4236 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4237
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004238- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4239 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004240 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4241 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4242 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004243
4244- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4245 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004246
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004247- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4248 bytes on its input.
4249
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004250Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004251-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004252
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004253- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004254 convenience function.
4255
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004256- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4257 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4258 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004259 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4260 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4261 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4262 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4263 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4264 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004265
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004266- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4267 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4268 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4269 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4270
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004271- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4272 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4273 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4274
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004275- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4276 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4277 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4278 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4279
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004280- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4281 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004282 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004283 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4284 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4285 new -l and -e options.
4286
4287- statcache is now deprecated.
4288
4289- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4290 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004291 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004292 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4293 time properly taken into account.
4294
4295- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4296 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4297 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4298 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4299
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004300Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004301-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004302
4303Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004304-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004305
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004306- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4307 is built with libdb3 if available.
4308
4309- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4310
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004311C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004312-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004313
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004314- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4315 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4316 PySequence_Size().
4317
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004318- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4319
4320- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4321 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4322 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4323
4324- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4325 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4326
4327- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4328 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4329
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004330New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004331-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004332
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004333- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4334 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4335
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004336- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4337 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4338
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004339- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4340
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004341Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004342-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004343
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004344- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4345 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4346
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004347Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004348-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004349
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004350Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004351----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004352
4353- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4354 removed completely in the next release.
4355
4356- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4357 OSX.
4358
4359- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4360 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4361
4362- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4363
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004364
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004365What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004366===========================
4367
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004368*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4369
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004370Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004371--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004372
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004373- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004374 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004375 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004376 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4377 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004378 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4379 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004380 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4381 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004382
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004383- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4384 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4385
4386- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4387 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4388
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004389Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004390-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004391
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004392- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4393 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4394 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4395 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4396 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4397 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4398 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4399 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4400
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004401- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4402 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4403 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4404 example).
4405
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004406- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004407 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004408 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004409 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004410
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004411- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4412 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4413 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004414 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004415
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004416- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4417 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4418 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4419 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4420 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4421 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4422
4423 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4424
4425 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4426
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004427Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004428-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004429
4430- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4431
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004432- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4433
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004434- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4435 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004436
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004437- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4438 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4439 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4440 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4441 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4442 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004443 attributes.
4444
4445- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4446 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4447 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004448
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004449- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4450 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4451 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004452
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004453- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4454 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4455 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004456 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4457 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4458
4459- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4460 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004461
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004462Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004463-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004464
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004465- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4466 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4467
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004468- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4469 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4470 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4471 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4472
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004473- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4474 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4475 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4476 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4477
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004478 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4479 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4480 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4481 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4482 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4483 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4484 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4485 without losing information).
4486
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004487- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004488 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4489 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4490 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4491 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4492 module).
4493
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004494 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004495 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4496 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4497 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4498 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004499
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004500- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004501 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4502 encoding.
4503
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004504- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4505 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4506
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004507- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004508 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4509
4510- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4511 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4512 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4513 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4514
4515- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4516
4517- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4518 ON, and OFF.
4519
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004520- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4521 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4522
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004523Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004524-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004525
4526- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4527 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4528 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004529
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004530- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4531 been added: -X and -E.
4532
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004533Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004534-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004535
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004536- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4537 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4538
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004539C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004540-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004541
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004542- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4543 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4544 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4545 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4546 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4547
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004548- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4549 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4550 as long) arguments.
4551
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004552- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4553 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4554 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4555 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4556 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4557 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4558
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004559- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4560 input.
4561
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004562New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004563-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004564
4565Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004566-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004567
4568Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004569-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004570
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004571- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4572 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4573 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4574
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004575- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4576 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4577 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004578 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004579
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004580 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4581 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4582 import signal
4583 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004584
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004585 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004586 while 1:
4587 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004588 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004589 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4590 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4591 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4592 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004593
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004594
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004595What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4596===========================
4597
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004598*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4599
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004600Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004601--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004602
4603- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4604 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4605 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4606
4607- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4608 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4609 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4610 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4611 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4612 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4613 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004614
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004615- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004616 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004617 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4618 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4619 associate a docstring with a property.
4620
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004621- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4622 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4623 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4624 other built-in object types.
4625
4626- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4627 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4628 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4629 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4630 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4631
4632- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4633 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4634
4635- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4636 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004637 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004638 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4639 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4640 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4641 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4642 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4643
4644- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4645 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4646 class.
4647
4648- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4649 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4650 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4651 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4652
4653- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4654 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4655 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4656 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4657
4658- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4659 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4660
4661- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4662 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4663 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4664 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4665 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004666 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004667 with the same value as s.
4668
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004669- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4670
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004671Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004672----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004673
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004674- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4675
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004676- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4677 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4678 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4679 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4680 objects.
4681
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004682- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4683 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004684 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4685 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4686
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004687- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4688 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4689 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4690
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004691Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004692-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004693
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004694- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4695 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4696 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4697 by the instances.
4698
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004699- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4700 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4701 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4702
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004703- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4704 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4705 before the entire comparison is complete.
4706
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004707- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4708 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4709 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4710
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004711- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4712 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4713 getwriter().
4714
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004715- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4716 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4717
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004718- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004719 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4720 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4721
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004722- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4723 iterable object.
4724
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004725- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4726 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004727
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004728- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4729 authentication.
4730
4731- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4732 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004733
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004734- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004735 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4736 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4737 a sample driver.)
4738
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004739Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004740-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004741
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004742- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4743 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4744 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4745 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4746 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4747 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4748 kernel has large file support.
4749
4750- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4751 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4752 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4753 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4754 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4755
4756- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4757 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4758 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4759
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004760C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004761-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004762
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004763- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4764 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4765
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004766New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004767-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004768
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004769- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4770 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4771
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004772Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004773-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004774
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004775- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4776 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4777 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4778 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4779 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4780
4781- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4782 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4783 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4784 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4785
4786- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4787 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4788
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004789Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004790-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004791
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004792- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004793 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4794 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004795
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004796
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004797What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4798===========================
4799
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004800*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4801
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004802Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004803----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004804
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004805- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4806 big to represent as a C double.
4807
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004808- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4809 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4810 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4811 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4812 restriction).
4813
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004814- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4815 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4816 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4817 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4818 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4819
4820 >>> dir([])
4821 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4822 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4823 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4824 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4825 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4826 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4827 'reverse', 'sort']
4828
4829 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4830
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004831- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004832 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4833 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4834 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4835 OverflowError exception.
4836
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004837- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004838 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004839 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4840 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4841 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4842 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4843 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004844 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004845 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4846 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4847
4848 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4849 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4850 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4851 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004852
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004853- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004854 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4855 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4856 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4857 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4858 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4859 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4860 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4861 once it is created.
4862
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004863- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4864 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4865 (key, value) pairs.
4866
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004867- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004868 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4869 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4870
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004871- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4872 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4873 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4874 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4875 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004876
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004877- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004878 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4879 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4880
4881 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4882
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004883- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004884 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4885
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004886Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004887-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004888
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004889- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004890 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4891 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004892
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004893- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4894 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4895 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4896 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4897 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4898 in this area anymore).
4899
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004900- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4901 threading.Timer.
4902
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004903- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4904 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4905
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004906- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004907 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4908
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004909- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004910 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4911 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4912 converted to Python longs.
4913
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004914- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004915 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4916
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004917- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4918 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4919 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4920
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004921Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004922-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004923
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004924- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4925 division operators as per PEP 238.
4926
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004927Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004928-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004929
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004930- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4931 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4932 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4933 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4934
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004935C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004936-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004937
4938- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004939
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004940- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4941 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004942 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004943
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004944 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4945 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004946 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004947 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004948
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004949- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004950 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4951 module:
4952
4953 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004954
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004955 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4956 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004957
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004958 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4959 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004960
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004961 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4962
4963 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4964
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004965- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004966 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4967 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4968 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004969
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004970New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004971-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004972
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004973- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4974 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4975 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4976 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4977 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004978
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004979Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004980-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004981
4982Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004983-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004984
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004985- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4986 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4987 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4988 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004989 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4990 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4991 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4992 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4993 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004994
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004995- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004996 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4997
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004998
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004999What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5000===========================
5001
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005002*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5003
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005004Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005005-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005006
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005007- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5008 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5009
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005010- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5011 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5012 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005013
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005014- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5015 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5016 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5017 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005018
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005019- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5020
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005021- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005022
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005023Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005024-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005025
5026- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005027 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005028 the module docstring for details.
5029
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005030Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005031-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005032
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005033- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005034 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5035 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5036 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005037
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005038- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5039 Nick Mathewson.
5040
5041Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005042----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005043
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005044- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5045 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5046 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5047 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5048 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5049 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5050 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5051 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5052
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005053- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5054 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5055 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5056 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5057
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005058- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5059 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5060 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5061 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5062 come a long way).
5063
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005064- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5065 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5066 write filters for these warnings).
5067
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005068- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5069 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5070 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5071 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5072 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5073
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005074- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5075 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5076 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5077 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5078 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5079 older distribution.
5080
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005081Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005082-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005083
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005084- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5085 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005086 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005087
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005088- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5089 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5090 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5091
5092- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5093
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005094- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5095
5096- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5097
5098- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5099
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005100- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005101
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005102- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5103
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005104New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005105-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005106
5107C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005108-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005109
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005110- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5111 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5112 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5113 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5114 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5115 against buffer overruns.
5116
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005117- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005118 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5119 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005120 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5121 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5122 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5123
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005124- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5125 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5126 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5127 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5128 deprecated.
5129
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005130Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005131-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005132
5133- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5134 relevant is found.
5135
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005136
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005137What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005138===========================
5139
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005140*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5141
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005142Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005143----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005144
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005145- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5146 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5147 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5148 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5149 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5150 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5151 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5152 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005153 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005154 repaired.
5155
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005156- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005157 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005158 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5159 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5160 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5161 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5162 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5163 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5164 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5165 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5166
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005167- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5168 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5169 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5170 leading BMO character).
5171
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005172- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5173 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5174 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5175
5176 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5177 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5178 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005179
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005180 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5181 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5182 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5183 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5184 for various simple to use conversions.
5185
5186 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5187 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5188
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005189 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5190 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5191 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5192 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5193 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5194 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5195 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5196 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5197 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5198 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5199 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5200 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5201 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5202 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5203 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005204
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005205- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5206 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5207 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005208 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005209 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005210
5211 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005212 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5213 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5214 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5215 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5216 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005217 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5218 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005219
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005220 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5221 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5222 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005223 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005224
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005225- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5226 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5227 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5228 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5229 floating arithmetic,
5230
5231 x = 9007199254740992.0
5232 print long(x)
5233
5234 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5235 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5236 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5237 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5238 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5239 functions are of good quality).
5240
5241 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5242 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5243 algorithms to break.
5244
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005245- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5246 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5247 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5248 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5249 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5250 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5251 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5252 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5253 order.
5254
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005255- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5256 operation along the most common code paths.
5257
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005258- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5259 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5260
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005261- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5262 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5263 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5264 {}.update(UserDict())
5265
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005266- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5267 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5268 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5269 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5270 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5271 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5272 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5273 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5274
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005275- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005276 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005277
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005278 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005279 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5280 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005281 join() method of strings
5282 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005283 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5284 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005285 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005286 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005287
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005288- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5289 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5290
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005291- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5292 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5293
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005294- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5295 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5296 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5297 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5298
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005299- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5300 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005301 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005302 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5303 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005304
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005305- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5306
5307
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005308Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005309-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005310
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005311- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005312 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005313 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5314 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5315
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005316- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5317 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5318
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005319- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5320 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5321 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5322 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5323
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005324- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5325 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5326 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5327
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005328- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5329
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005330- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5331
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005332- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5333 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5334 that are still imported into string.py).
5335
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005336- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5337
5338- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5339 Now it does.
5340
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005341- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5342
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005343- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5344 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5345 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5346 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5347 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005348 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5349 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005350
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005351- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5352 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5353 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5354 'help(object)'.
5355
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005356Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005357-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005358
5359- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005360 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005361 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5362 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5363
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005364- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005365 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5366 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005367
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005368C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005369-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005370
5371- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5372 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005373
5374----
5375
5376**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**