blob: 41d5475d21162ec2901ec913b21f14da090e957c [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2006*
11
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000012Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Brett Cannonbf364092006-03-01 04:25:17 +000015- PEP 352, patch #1104669: Make exceptions new-style objects. Introduced the
16 new exception base class, BaseException, which has a new message attribute.
17 KeyboardInterrupt and SystemExit to directly inherit from BaseException now.
18 Raising a string exception now raises a DeprecationWarning.
19
Thomas Woutersfb609f42006-02-28 16:37:25 +000020- Patch #1438387, PEP 328: relative and absolute imports. Imports can now be
21 explicitly relative, using 'from .module import name' to mean 'from the same
22 package as this module is in. Imports without dots still default to the
23 old relative-then-absolute, unless 'from __future__ import
24 absolute_import' is used.
25
Brett Cannona7446e32006-02-27 23:39:10 +000026- Properly check if 'warnings' raises an exception (usually when a filter set
27 to "error" is triggered) when raising a warning for raising string
28 exceptions.
29
Neal Norwitz0023a2f2006-02-27 23:24:48 +000030- CO_GENERATOR_ALLOWED is no longer defined, this behavior is the default.
31 The name was removed from Include/code.h.
32
Neal Norwitzeb651252006-02-27 16:47:12 +000033- PEP 308: conditional expressions were added (x if cond else y).
34
Guido van Rossum1968ad32006-02-25 22:38:04 +000035- Patch 1433928:
36 - The copy module now "copies" function objects (as atomic objects).
37 - dict.__getitem__ now looks for a __missing__ hook before raising
38 KeyError.
39
Tim Peters84ef21c2006-02-28 20:39:06 +000040- PEP 343: with statement implemented. Needs ``from __future__ import
41 with_statement``. Use of 'with' as a variable will generate a warning.
42 Use of 'as' as a variable will also generate a warning (unless it's
Neal Norwitz055ec242006-02-28 20:06:49 +000043 part of an import statement).
Guido van Rossum1a5e21e2006-02-28 21:57:43 +000044 The following objects have __context__ methods:
45 - The built-in file type.
46 - The thread.LockType type.
47 - The following types defined by the threading module:
48 Lock, RLock, Condition, Semaphore, BoundedSemaphore.
49 - The decimal.Context class.
Guido van Rossumc2e20742006-02-27 22:32:47 +000050
Marc-André Lemburgfe4b34c2006-02-19 15:22:22 +000051- Fix the encodings package codec search function to only search
52 inside its own package. Fixes problem reported in patch #1433198.
53
54 Note: Codec packages should implement and register their own
55 codec search function. PEP 100 has the details.
56
Martin v. Löwis18e16552006-02-15 17:27:45 +000057- PEP 353: Using ssize_t as the index type.
58
Neal Norwitzfc76d632006-01-10 06:03:13 +000059- Patch #1400181, fix unicode string formatting to not use the locale.
60 This is how string objects work. u'%f' could use , instead of .
61 for the decimal point. Now both strings and unicode always use periods.
62
Neal Norwitz671b9e32006-01-09 07:07:12 +000063- Bug #1244610, #1392915, fix build problem on OpenBSD 3.7 and 3.8.
64 configure would break checking curses.h.
65
Georg Brandlcd4d1e82005-12-27 17:37:07 +000066- Bug #959576: The pwd module is now builtin. This allows Python to be
67 built on UNIX platforms without $HOME set.
68
Neal Norwitzc10978f2005-12-19 06:07:16 +000069- Bug #1072182, fix some potential problems if characters are signed.
70
Neal Norwitz5d0ad502005-12-19 04:27:42 +000071- Bug #889500, fix line number on SyntaxWarning for global declarations.
72
Neal Norwitzdb83eb32005-12-18 05:29:30 +000073- Bug #1378022, UTF-8 files with a leading BOM crashed the interpreter.
74
Neal Norwitze7214a12005-12-18 05:03:17 +000075- Support for converting hex strings to floats no longer works.
76 This was not portable. float('0x3') now raises a ValueError.
77
Barry Warsaw2a38a862005-12-18 01:27:35 +000078- Patch #1382163: Expose Subversion revision number to Python. New C API
79 function Py_GetBuildNumber(). New attribute sys.build_number. Build number
80 is now displayed in interactive prompt banner.
81
Georg Brandlfa166682005-12-17 21:45:17 +000082- Implementation of PEP 341 - Unification of try/except and try/finally.
83 "except" clauses can now be written together with a "finally" clause in
Neal Norwitz11ca77e2005-12-17 22:24:12 +000084 one try statement instead of two nested ones. Patch #1355913.
Georg Brandlfa166682005-12-17 21:45:17 +000085
Hye-Shik Chang835b2432005-12-17 04:38:31 +000086- Bug #1379994: Builtin unicode_escape and raw_unicode_escape codec
87 now encodes backslash correctly.
88
Martin v. Löwisb45b3152005-11-28 17:34:23 +000089- Patch #1350409: Work around signal handling bug in Visual Studio 2005.
90
Georg Brandlf06e30a2005-11-24 15:37:42 +000091- Bug #1281408: Py_BuildValue now works correct even with unsigned longs
92 and long longs.
93
Neal Norwitz67715f02005-11-09 06:59:35 +000094- SF Bug #1350188, "setdlopenflags" leads to crash upon "import"
95 It was possible dlerror() returns a NULL pointer, use a default error
96 message in this case.
97
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +000098- Replaced most Unicode charmap codecs with new ones using the
99 new Unicode translate string feature in the builtin charmap
100 codec; the codecs were created from the mapping tables available
101 at ftp.unicode.org and contain a few updates (e.g. the Mac OS
102 encodings now include a mapping for the Apple logo)
103
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000104- Added a few more codecs for Mac OS encodings
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +0000105
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +0000106- Speed up some Unicode operations.
107
Martin v. Löwisbd260da2006-02-26 19:42:26 +0000108- A new AST parser implementation was completed. The abstract
109 syntax tree is available for read-only (non-compile) access
Martin v. Löwis577b5b92006-02-27 15:23:19 +0000110 to Python code; an _ast module was added.
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +0000111
Neal Norwitzb6570f52005-10-21 06:26:10 +0000112- SF bug #1167751: fix incorrect code being for generator expressions.
Neal Norwitz16af7342005-10-21 06:25:33 +0000113 The following code now raises a SyntaxError: foo(a = i for i in range(10))
114
Neal Norwitz708e51a2005-10-03 04:48:15 +0000115- SF Bug #976608: fix SystemError when mtime of an imported file is -1.
116
Neal Norwitz11bd1192005-10-03 00:54:56 +0000117- SF Bug #887946: fix segfault when redirecting stdin from a directory.
118 Provide a warning when a directory is passed on the command line.
119
Neal Norwitz40d37812005-10-02 01:48:49 +0000120- Fix segfault with invalid coding.
121
122- SF bug #772896: unknown encoding results in MemoryError.
123
Raymond Hettinger6b27cda2005-09-24 21:23:05 +0000124- All iterators now have a Boolean value of true. Formerly, some iterators
125 supported a __len__() method which evaluated to False when the iterator
126 was empty.
127
Guido van Rossum630db602005-09-20 18:49:54 +0000128- On 64-bit platforms, when __len__() returns a value that cannot be
129 represented as a C int, raise OverflowError.
130
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +0000131- test__locale is skipped on OS X < 10.4 (only partial locale support is
Walter Dörwald6611a8b2005-10-09 19:28:35 +0000132 present).
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +0000133
Georg Brandl80bbf3f2005-09-14 19:38:29 +0000134- SF bug #893549: parsing keyword arguments was broken with a few format
135 codes.
136
Guido van Rossum8ee3e5a2005-09-14 18:09:42 +0000137- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on AIX 5.3
138 with IBM's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1284289). This also closes SF
139 bug #105470: test_pwd fails on 64bit system (Opteron).
140
Guido van Rossum539c6622005-09-14 17:49:54 +0000141- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on HP-UX 11 on
142 Itanium2 with HP's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1225212).
143
Georg Brandl4550b8d2005-08-26 06:43:52 +0000144- Disallow keyword arguments for type constructors that don't use them
Georg Brandl02c42872005-08-26 06:42:30 +0000145 (fixes bug #1119418).
146
Martin v. Löwisd35edda2005-08-24 08:39:24 +0000147- Forward UnicodeDecodeError into SyntaxError for source encoding errors.
148
Barry Warsawe2eca0b2005-08-15 18:14:19 +0000149- SF bug #900092: When tracing (e.g. for hotshot), restore 'return' events for
150 exceptions that cause a function to exit.
151
Raymond Hettinger9f1a6792005-07-31 01:16:36 +0000152- The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
153 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
154 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
155
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +0000156- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
157
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +0000158- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
159 reference counts in some error exit cases.
160
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000161- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
162 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
163 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
164 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
165 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
166 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
167 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
168 realloc.
169
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +0000170- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
171 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
172
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +0000173- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
174 like their int counterparts.
175
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +0000176- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
177 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
178 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
179 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
180 for a longer write-up of the problem).
181
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +0000182- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
183 serializing floats.
184
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +0000185- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
186 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
187 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
188
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +0000189- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
190 278.
191
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000192- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
193 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
194 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
195 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000196 to the base class has been moved to the proper nb_* magic slot and out of
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000197 PyNumber_*().
198 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
199
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +0000200- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
201 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
202 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
203 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
204
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +0000205- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
206 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
207 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
208 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
209 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
210
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +0000211- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
212 disabled caused a crash.
213
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000214- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
215 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
216
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000217- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +0000218 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
219
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +0000220- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
221
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000222- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +0000223 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
224 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
225 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000226
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +0000227- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
228
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +0000229- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
230 returning None.
231
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000232- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +0000233 ('\') with a specific error message.
234
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +0000235- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
236
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +0000237- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
238 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
239
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000240- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000241 an ferror() call.
242
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000243- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
244 list.sort().
245
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000246- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
247 (2+3) --> (5).
248
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000249- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
250
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000251- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
252 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000253
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000254- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
255 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
256 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
257
Neil Schemenauercf52c072005-08-12 17:34:58 +0000258- Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a
259 unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and
260 calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance.
261
Tim Petersf4e69282006-02-27 17:15:31 +0000262- Patch #1413181: changed ``PyThreadState_Delete()`` to forget about the
263 current thread state when the auto-GIL-state machinery knows about
264 it (since the thread state is being deleted, continuing to remember it
265 can't help, but can hurt if another thread happens to get created with
266 the same thread id).
267
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000268Extension Modules
269-----------------
270
Guido van Rossum1968ad32006-02-25 22:38:04 +0000271- Patch 1433928: Added a new type, defaultdict, to the collections module.
272 This uses the new __missing__ hook behavior added to dict (see above).
273
Georg Brandldbd83392006-02-20 09:42:33 +0000274- Bug #854823: socketmodule now builds on Sun platforms even when
275 INET_ADDRSTRLEN is not defined.
276
Georg Brandlf4f44152006-02-18 22:29:33 +0000277- Patch #1393157: os.startfile() now has an optional argument to specify
278 a "command verb" to invoke on the file.
279
Neal Norwitz082b2df2006-02-07 07:04:46 +0000280- Bug #876637, prevent stack corruption when socket descriptor
281 is larger than FD_SETSIZE.
282
Neal Norwitz0e6bc8c2006-02-05 05:45:43 +0000283- Patch #1407135, bug #1424041: harmonize mmap behavior of anonymous memory.
284 mmap.mmap(-1, size) now returns anonymous memory in both Unix and Windows.
285 mmap.mmap(0, size) should not be used on Windows for anonymous memory.
286
Martin v. Löwis57a34e82006-02-04 19:12:37 +0000287- Patch #1422385: The nis module now supports access to domains other
288 than the system default domain.
289
Martin v. Löwis14694662006-02-03 12:54:16 +0000290- Use Win32 API to implement os.stat/fstat. As a result, subsecond timestamps
291 are reported, the limit on path name lengths is removed, and stat reports
292 WindowsError now (instead of OSError).
293
Gregory P. Smithcfc4a8d2006-01-29 19:46:23 +0000294- Add bsddb.db.DBEnv.set_tx_timestamp allowing time based database recovery.
295
Neal Norwitz62a21122006-01-25 05:21:55 +0000296- Bug #1413192, fix seg fault in bsddb if a transaction was deleted
297 before the env.
298
Martin v. Löwis11017b12006-01-14 18:12:57 +0000299- Patch #1103116: Basic AF_NETLINK support.
300
Neal Norwitz3b4fff82006-01-11 08:54:45 +0000301- Bug #1402308, (possible) segfault when using mmap.mmap(-1, ...)
302
Neal Norwitz88bbd732006-01-10 07:05:44 +0000303- Bug #1400822, _curses over{lay,write} doesn't work when passing 6 ints.
304 Also fix ungetmouse() which did not accept arguments properly.
305 The code now conforms to the documented signature.
306
Neal Norwitz5e3d8622006-01-09 06:24:35 +0000307- Bug #1400115, Fix segfault when calling curses.panel.userptr()
308 without prior setting of the userptr.
309
Neal Norwitz40c6b472006-01-05 05:43:35 +0000310- Fix 64-bit problems in bsddb.
311
Neal Norwitz8856fb72005-12-18 03:34:22 +0000312- Patch #1365916: fix some unsafe 64-bit mmap methods.
313
Hye-Shik Changc5c57e62005-12-12 11:48:32 +0000314- Bug #1290333: Added a workaround for cjkcodecs' _codecs_cn build
315 problem on AIX.
316
Georg Brandla13c2442005-11-22 19:30:31 +0000317- Bug #869197: os.setgroups rejects long integer arguments
318
Neal Norwitz0f46bbf2005-11-03 05:00:25 +0000319- Bug #1346533, select.poll() doesn't raise an error if timeout > sys.maxint
320
Neal Norwitz7b631792005-11-02 05:26:07 +0000321- Bug #1344508, Fix UNIX mmap leaking file descriptors
322
Neal Norwitzf3396542005-10-28 05:52:22 +0000323- Patch #1338314, Bug #1336623: fix tarfile so it can extract
324 REGTYPE directories from tarfiles written by old programs.
325
Gregory P. Smithe101df92006-01-24 20:09:45 +0000326- Patch #1407992, fixes broken bsddb module db associate when using
327 BerkeleyDB 3.3, 4.0 or 4.1.
328
329- Get bsddb module to build with BerkeleyDB version 4.4
330
331- Get bsddb module to build with BerkeleyDB version 3.2
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +0000332
Neal Norwitz484d9a42005-09-30 04:46:49 +0000333- Patch #1309009, Fix segfault in pyexpat when the XML document is in latin_1,
334 but Python incorrectly assumes it is in UTF-8 format
335
Georg Brandle677adc2005-09-29 13:40:49 +0000336- Fix parse errors in the readline module when compiling without threads.
337
Hye-Shik Chang9ceebd52005-09-24 14:58:47 +0000338- Patch #1288833: Removed thread lock from socket.getaddrinfo on
339 FreeBSD 5.3 and later versions which got thread-safe getaddrinfo(3).
340
Michael W. Hudson10402a32005-09-22 09:19:01 +0000341- Patches #1298449 and #1298499: Add some missing checks for error
342 returns in cStringIO.c.
343
Neal Norwitz058bde12005-09-21 06:44:25 +0000344- Patch #1297028: fix segfault if call type on MultibyteCodec,
345 MultibyteStreamReader, or MultibyteStreamWriter
346
Neal Norwitzcfe7dd92005-09-19 06:49:27 +0000347- Fix memory leak in posix.access().
348
Martin v. Löwis8b291e22005-09-18 08:17:56 +0000349- Patch #1213831: Fix typo in unicodedata._getcode.
350
Georg Brandlfb1ef852005-09-14 20:53:32 +0000351- Bug #1007046: os.startfile() did not accept unicode strings encoded in
352 the file system encoding.
353
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000354- Patch #756021: Special-case socket.inet_aton('255.255.255.255') for
355 platforms that don't have inet_aton().
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000356
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000357- Bug #1215928: Fix bz2.BZ2File.seek() for 64-bit file offsets.
358
359- Bug #1191043: Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines for files containing one
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000360 line without newlines.
361
Georg Brandl38387b82005-08-24 07:17:40 +0000362- Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did
363 on Windows.
364
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000365- Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
Martin v. Löwisebd9d5b2005-08-09 15:00:59 +0000366 st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
367
Michael W. Hudson8137bea2005-07-27 20:24:40 +0000368- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
369 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
370 for large or negative values.
371
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000372- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000373 implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false.
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000374
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000375- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
376
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000377- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
378 if available on the platform.
379
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000380- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
381 available on the platform.
382
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000383- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
384 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
385
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000386- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
387
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000388- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
389 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
390 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
391
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000392- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
393
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000394- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
395 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
396
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000397- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000398 file size.
399
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000400- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
401
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000402- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
403 {remove_history,replace_history}
404
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000405- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
406 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000407
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000408- stat_float_times is now True.
409
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000410- array.array objects are now picklable.
411
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000412- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
413 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
414
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000415- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
416 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
417 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
418
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000419- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
420 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000421
422Library
423-------
424
Guido van Rossum1a5e21e2006-02-28 21:57:43 +0000425- PEP 343: new module contextlib.py defines decorator @contextmanager
426 and helpful context managers nested() and closing().
427
Martin v. Löwis415ed932006-02-27 19:56:30 +0000428- The compiler package now supports future imports after the module docstring.
429
Georg Brandl8f7c54e2006-02-20 08:40:38 +0000430- Bug #1413790: zipfile now sanitizes absolute archive names that are
431 not allowed by the specs.
432
Georg Brandlc98eeed2006-02-19 14:57:47 +0000433- Patch #1215184: FileInput now can be given an opening hook which can
434 be used to control how files are opened.
435
Georg Brandlc029f872006-02-19 14:12:34 +0000436- Patch #1212287: fileinput.input() now has a mode parameter for
437 specifying the file mode input files should be opened with.
438
Georg Brandl67e9fb92006-02-19 13:56:17 +0000439- Patch #1215184: fileinput now has a fileno() function for getting the
440 current file number.
441
Georg Brandl602b9ba2006-02-19 13:26:36 +0000442- Patch #1349274: gettext.install() now optionally installs additional
443 translation functions other than _() in the builtin namespace.
444
Georg Brandle4662172006-02-19 09:51:27 +0000445- Patch #1337756: fileinput now accepts Unicode filenames.
446
Georg Brandl7b4e7c22006-02-18 21:10:56 +0000447- Patch #1373643: The chunk module can now read chunks larger than
448 two gigabytes.
449
Georg Brandl21dd1af2006-02-17 13:35:13 +0000450- Patch #1417555: SimpleHTTPServer now returns Last-Modified headers.
451
Georg Brandlbd3bc4d2006-02-17 09:52:53 +0000452- Bug #1430298: It is now possible to send a mail with an empty
453 return address using smtplib.
454
Georg Brandl0e1abe22006-02-17 09:48:14 +0000455- Bug #1432260: The names of lambda functions are now properly displayed
456 in pydoc.
Georg Brandl501dd0d2006-02-17 09:45:40 +0000457
Martin v. Löwis00756902006-02-05 17:09:41 +0000458- Patch #1412872: zipfile now sets the creator system to 3 (Unix)
459 unless the system is Win32.
460
Tim Petersda1329b2006-02-27 16:50:01 +0000461- Patch #1349118: urllib now supports user:pass@ style proxy
Martin v. Löwis3e865952006-01-24 15:51:21 +0000462 specifications, raises IOErrors when proxies for unsupported protocols
463 are defined, and uses the https proxy on https redirections.
464
Georg Brandl531ceba2006-01-21 07:20:56 +0000465- Bug #902075: urllib2 now supports 'host:port' style proxy specifications.
466
467- Bug #1407902: Add support for sftp:// URIs to urlparse.
Georg Brandl89f35ac2006-01-20 17:24:23 +0000468
Georg Brandlb709c2c2006-01-20 09:07:35 +0000469- Bug #1371247: Update Windows locale identifiers in locale.py.
470
Neal Norwitzf60cd472006-01-14 07:05:13 +0000471- Bug #1394565: SimpleHTTPServer now doesn't choke on query parameters
Georg Brandl45ab2332006-01-13 17:05:56 +0000472 any more.
Georg Brandlb709c2c2006-01-20 09:07:35 +0000473
Georg Brandl4edd9892006-01-13 16:59:46 +0000474- Bug #1403410: The warnings module now doesn't get confused
475 when it can't find out the module name it generates a warning for.
Georg Brandlb709c2c2006-01-20 09:07:35 +0000476
Martin v. Löwis412ed3b2006-01-08 10:45:39 +0000477- Patch #1177307: Added a new codec utf_8_sig for UTF-8 with a BOM signature.
478
Neal Norwitzab86f8e2005-12-23 21:44:36 +0000479- Patch #1157027: cookielib mishandles RFC 2109 cookies in Netscape mode
480
Neal Norwitz338e7862005-12-23 21:27:46 +0000481- Patch #1117398: cookielib.LWPCookieJar and .MozillaCookieJar now raise
482 LoadError as documented, instead of IOError. For compatibility,
483 LoadError subclasses IOError.
484
Brett Cannon3cbd0382005-12-16 22:49:23 +0000485- Added the hashlib module. It provides secure hash functions for MD5 and
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000486 SHA1, 224, 256, 384, and 512. Note that recent developments make the
487 historic MD5 and SHA1 unsuitable for cryptographic-strength applications.
488 In <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-December/058850.html>
489 Ronald L. Rivest offered this advice for Python:
490
491 "The consensus of researchers in this area (at least as
492 expressed at the NIST Hash Function Workshop 10/31/05),
493 is that SHA-256 is a good choice for the time being, but
494 that research should continue, and other alternatives may
495 arise from this research. The larger SHA's also seem OK."
Brett Cannon3cbd0382005-12-16 22:49:23 +0000496
Fredrik Lundh7e0aef02005-12-12 18:54:55 +0000497- Added a subset of Fredrik Lundh's ElementTree package. Available
498 modules are xml.etree.ElementTree, xml.etree.ElementPath, and
499 xml.etree.ElementInclude, from ElementTree 1.2.6.
500
Martin v. Löwis307021f2005-11-27 16:59:04 +0000501- Patch #1162825: Support non-ASCII characters in IDLE window titles.
502
Georg Brandl1f663572005-11-26 16:50:44 +0000503- Bug #1365984: urllib now opens "data:" URLs again.
504
Brett Cannonad07ff22005-11-23 02:15:50 +0000505- Patch #1314396: prevent deadlock for threading.Thread.join() when an exception
506 is raised within the method itself on a previous call (e.g., passing in an
507 illegal argument)
508
Brett Cannon5d0bf942005-11-02 23:04:26 +0000509- Bug #1340337: change time.strptime() to always return ValueError when there
510 is an error in the format string.
511
Georg Brandle8f24432005-10-03 14:16:44 +0000512- Patch #754022: Greatly enhanced webbrowser.py (by Oleg Broytmann).
513
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000514- Bug #729103: pydoc.py: Fix docother() method to accept additional
Georg Brandl8b813db2005-10-01 16:32:31 +0000515 "parent" argument.
516
Georg Brandlaa935172005-09-29 20:49:16 +0000517- Patch #1300515: xdrlib.py: Fix pack_fstring() to really use null bytes
518 for padding.
519
Georg Brandl80ba8e82005-09-29 20:16:07 +0000520- Bug #1296004: httplib.py: Limit maximal amount of data read from the
521 socket to avoid a MemoryError on Windows.
522
Matthias Klosef3f231f2005-09-20 07:02:49 +0000523- Patch #1166948: locale.py: Prefer LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE and LANG over LANGUAGE
524 to get the correct encoding.
525
526- Patch #1166938: locale.py: Parse LANGUAGE as a colon separated list of
527 languages.
528
Martin v. Löwis4ed67382005-09-18 08:34:39 +0000529- Patch #1268314: Cache lines in StreamReader.readlines for performance.
530
Brett Cannona783d062005-09-15 02:34:56 +0000531- Bug #1290505: Fix clearing the regex cache for time.strptime().
532
Martin v. Löwis5dbdc592005-08-27 10:07:56 +0000533- Bug #1167128: Fix size of a symlink in a tarfile to be 0.
534
Georg Brandl5a650a22005-08-26 08:51:34 +0000535- Patch #810023: Fix off-by-one bug in urllib.urlretrieve reporthook
536 functionality.
537
Martin v. Löwis8b595142005-08-25 11:03:38 +0000538- Bug #1163178: Make IDNA return an empty string when the input is empty.
539
Georg Brandl532efab2005-08-24 22:34:21 +0000540- Patch #848017: Make Cookie more RFC-compliant. Use CRLF as default output
541 separator and do not output trailing semicola.
542
Georg Brandlb9256022005-08-24 18:46:39 +0000543- Patch #1062060: urllib.urlretrieve() now raises a new exception, named
544 ContentTooShortException, when the actually downloaded size does not
545 match the Content-Length header.
546
Martin v. Löwis0a5d4a22005-08-24 14:55:22 +0000547- Bug #1121494: distutils.dir_utils.mkpath now accepts Unicode strings.
548
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000549- Bug #1178484: Return complete lines from codec stream readers
550 even if there is an exception in later lines, resulting in
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000551 correct line numbers for decoding errors in source code.
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000552
Georg Brandl6d2b3462005-08-24 07:36:17 +0000553- Bug #1192315: Disallow negative arguments to clear() in pdb.
554
Martin v. Löwisb813c532005-08-07 20:51:04 +0000555- Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
556
Georg Brandl649f8e72005-08-03 07:30:12 +0000557- Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
558 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
559
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000560- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
561 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
562 Tkdnd.
563
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000564- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
565 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
566
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000567- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
568 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
569
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000570- textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000571 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
572
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000573- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
574 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
575
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000576- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
577 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
578
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000579- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000580 it can be missing in embedded interpreters
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000581
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000582- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
583
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000584- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
585 error messages.
586
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000587- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
588
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000589- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
590 Bug #1224621.
591
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000592- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
593 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
594 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
595 terminates by raising StopIteration.
596
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000597- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
598
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000599- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
600 component of the path.
601
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000602- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
603 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
604 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
605 class at all.
606
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000607- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
608 files to PyPI.
609
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000610- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
611 them to PyPI.
612
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000613- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
614 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
615 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
616 work as expected.
617
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000618- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
619 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
620
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000621- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000622 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
623
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000624- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
625
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000626- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
627 to build.
628
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000629- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
630 symbolic links on Windows.
631
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000632- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000633 profile.py if available.
634
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000635- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
636
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000637- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
638 in LWPCookieJar.
639
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000640- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
641
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000642- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
643
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000644- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
645
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000646- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
647
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000648- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
649
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000650- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
651
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000652- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
653
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000654- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
655
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000656- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
657 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
658 be exploited in various ways.
659
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000660- Bug #1222790: in SimpleXMLRPCServer, set the reuse-address and close-on-exec
Andrew M. Kuchling3a976052005-12-04 15:07:41 +0000661 flags on the HTTP listening socket.
662
Andrew M. Kuchlinge63fde72005-12-04 15:36:57 +0000663- Bug #792570: SimpleXMLRPCServer had problems if the request grew too large.
664 Fixed by reading the HTTP body in chunks instead of one big socket.read().
665
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000666- Patches #893642, #1039083: add allow_none, encoding arguments to constructors of
Andrew M. Kuchling10a16de2005-12-04 16:34:40 +0000667 SimpleXMLRPCServer and CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler.
668
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000669- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
670
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000671- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
672
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000673- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
674
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000675- Enhancements to the csv module:
676
677 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000678 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000679 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000680 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
681 reporting.
682 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
683 dictates.
684 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000685 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000686 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000687 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
688 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000689 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
690 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000691 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000692 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
693 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
694 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
695 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
696 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
697 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
698 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
699 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
700 without first creating a dialect class.
701 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
702 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
703 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000704 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000705 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
706 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000707 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
708 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
709 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
710 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000711 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
712 This has been fixed.
713
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000714- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
715 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
716 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
717 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
718
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000719- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
720
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000721- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
722 (Bug #951915).
723
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000724- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
725 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
726 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000727 encoding alias table.
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000728
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000729- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
730
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000731- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
732 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
733
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000734- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
735
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000736- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
737
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000738- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
739
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000740- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
741
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000742- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
743
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000744- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
745 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
746 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
747
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000748- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000749 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000750
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000751- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
752 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
753 tokenizer with very long source lines.
754
Barry Warsaw538561e2006-01-01 21:48:54 +0000755- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called
756 immediately after creating the object, without any intervening
757 ``.decompress()`` calls.
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000758
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000759- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
760 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000761
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000762- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
763 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
764
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000765- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
766 correctly.
767
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000768- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
769 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
770 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
771 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
772 between two lines.
773
Walter Dörwalda47d1c02005-08-30 10:23:14 +0000774- Bug #1251300: On UCS-4 builds the "unicode-internal" codec will now complain
775 about illegal code points. The codec now supports PEP 293 style error
776 handlers.
777
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000778- Bug #1235646: ``codecs.StreamRecoder.next()`` now reencodes the data it reads
Walter Dörwaldc5238b82005-09-01 11:56:53 +0000779 from the input stream, so that the output is a byte string in the correct
780 encoding instead of a unicode string.
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000781
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000782- Bug #1202493: Fixing SRE parser to handle '{}' as perl does, rather than
783 considering it exactly like a '*'.
784
Walter Dörwald007f8df2005-10-09 19:42:27 +0000785- Bug #1245379: Add "unicode-1-1-utf-7" as an alias for "utf-7" to
786 ``encodings.aliases``.
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000787
Walter Dörwald09f0dd52005-11-21 19:10:07 +0000788- ` uu.encode()`` and ``uu.decode()`` now support unicode filenames.
789
Gustavo Niemeyer548148812006-01-31 18:34:13 +0000790- Patch #1413711: Certain patterns of differences were making difflib
791 touch the recursion limit.
792
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000793Build
794-----
795
Martin v. Löwis86d66262006-02-17 08:40:11 +0000796- Patch #1432345: Make python compile on DragonFly.
797
Martin v. Löwis856bf9a2006-02-14 20:42:55 +0000798- Build support for Win64-AMD64 was added.
799
Martin v. Löwisa55e55e2006-02-11 15:55:14 +0000800- Patch #1428494: Prefer linking against ncursesw over ncurses library.
801
Martin v. Löwisfd9a72a2006-01-08 10:07:33 +0000802- Patch #881820: look for openpty and forkpty also in libbsd.
803
Martin v. Löwis64c33dd2006-01-03 07:42:14 +0000804- The sources of zlib are now part of the Python distribution (zlib 1.2.3).
805 The zlib module is now builtin on Windows.
806
Martin v. Löwisd5845ec2005-12-30 12:31:38 +0000807- Use -xcode=pic32 for CCSHARED on Solaris with SunPro.
808
Martin v. Löwis147fbe52005-08-07 21:09:30 +0000809- Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
810 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
811
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000812- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
813 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
814
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000815- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
816 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
817 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000818 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000819
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000820- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
821 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
822 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
823
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000824- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
825
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000826- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
827 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
828
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000829- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
830 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
831 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
832 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
833 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
834 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
835 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
836 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
837
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000838- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
839 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
840 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
841 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
842
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000843C API
844-----
845
Raymond Hettingerbeb31012005-08-16 03:47:52 +0000846- Added a C API for set and frozenset objects.
847
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000848- Removed PyRange_New().
849
Walter Dörwaldd1c1e102005-10-06 20:29:57 +0000850- Patch #1313939: PyUnicode_DecodeCharmap() accepts a unicode string as the
851 mapping argument now. This string is used as a mapping table. Byte values
852 greater than the length of the string and 0xFFFE are treated as undefined
853 mappings.
854
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000855
856Tests
857-----
858
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000859- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000860
Hye-Shik Changaaa2f1d2005-12-10 17:44:27 +0000861- Patch #1276356: New resource "urlfetch" is implemented. This enables
862 even impatient people to run tests that require remote files.
863
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000864
865Documentation
866-------------
867
Georg Brandl8cb30772006-01-20 09:34:29 +0000868- Bug #1402224: Add warning to dl docs about crashes.
869
Georg Brandla3a93ae2006-01-20 09:14:36 +0000870- Bug #1396471: Document that Windows' ftell() can return invalid
871 values for text files with UNIX-style line endings.
872
Georg Brandl32252422005-09-14 20:42:00 +0000873- Bug #1274828: Document os.path.splitunc().
874
Georg Brandl79c122f2005-08-24 07:31:33 +0000875- Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py.
876
Georg Brandl6f2bbd32005-08-24 07:26:55 +0000877- Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation.
878
Georg Brandlf13c4ba2005-08-02 10:28:08 +0000879- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
880
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000881- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
882
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000883- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
884
885- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
886
887- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
888
889- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
890
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000891- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
892 Closes bug #1166582.
893
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000894- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
895 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
896 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
897
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000898Mac
899---
900
901
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000902New platforms
903-------------
904
905- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
906
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000907
908Tools/Demos
909-----------
910
Brett Cannonacde7342006-03-01 04:28:00 +0000911- Created Misc/Vim/vim_syntax.py to auto-generate a python.vim file in that
912 directory for syntax highlighting in Vim. Vim directory was added and placed
913 vimrc to it (was previous up a level).
914
Georg Brandl56897312005-08-24 18:32:30 +0000915- Added two new files to Tools/scripts: pysource.py, which recursively
916 finds Python source files, and findnocoding.py, which finds Python
917 source files that need an encoding declaration.
918 Patch #784089, credits to Oleg Broytmann.
919
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000920- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
921
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000922- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000923
Barry Warsaw538561e2006-01-01 21:48:54 +0000924- Fixed a display glitch in Pynche, which could cause the right arrow to
925 wiggle over by a pixel.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000926
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000927What's New in Python 2.4 final?
928===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000929
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000930*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000931
932Core and builtins
933-----------------
934
935- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
936 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
937 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
938
939
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000940What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
941==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000942
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000943*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000944
945Core and builtins
946-----------------
947
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000948- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
949 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
950 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
951
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000952
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000953Library
954-------
955
956- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
957 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
958 raised is re-raised.
959
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000960- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
961 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
962
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000963- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
964 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
965 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
966 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
967 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
968 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
969 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
970 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
971 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
972 by the slice are recomputed now.
973
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000974- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000975
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000976Build
977-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000978
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000979- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
980 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
981 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000982
983C API
984-----
985
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000986- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
987
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000988
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000989What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
990================================
991
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000992*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000993
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000994License
995-------
996
997The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
998is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
999changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
1000Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
1001intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
1002durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
1003the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
1004License::
1005
1006 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
1007
1008says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
1009to Python 2.1.1.
1010
1011The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
1012License Version 2.
1013
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001014Core and builtins
1015-----------------
1016
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +00001017- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
1018 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
1019 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
1020 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
1021 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
1022 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
1023 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
Andrew M. Kuchlingb2a739d2005-11-22 15:14:44 +00001024 ``AttributeError`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +00001025 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
1026 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
1027
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +00001028- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001029
1030Extension Modules
1031-----------------
1032
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +00001033- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
1034 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
1035 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
1036 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001037
1038Library
1039-------
1040
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +00001041- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
1042 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
1043 returned.
1044
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +00001045- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
1046
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +00001047- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
1048 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
1049
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +00001050- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
1051
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +00001052- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
1053 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001054
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +00001055- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
1056
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +00001057- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
1058
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +00001059- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +00001060 the source code is updated and reloaded.
1061
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001062Build
1063-----
1064
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +00001065- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001066
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001067What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
1068================================
1069
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +00001070*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001071
1072Core and builtins
1073-----------------
1074
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +00001075- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +00001076 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
1077
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +00001078- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
1079 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
1080 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
1081 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
1082
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +00001083- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
1084 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
1085
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +00001086- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
1087 constant.
1088
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +00001089- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
1090 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
1091 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
1092 large), and to anomalies such as
1093 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
1094 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
1095 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
1096 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001097
1098Extension modules
1099-----------------
1100
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +00001101- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
1102 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +00001103 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
1104 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
1105 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001106
1107Library
1108-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +00001109
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +00001110- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +00001111 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +00001112 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
1113 --swig-cpp.
1114
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +00001115- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
1116 it is set.
1117
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +00001118- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +00001119
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +00001120- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
1121 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
1122 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
1123 Closes bug #1039270.
1124
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +00001125- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +00001126
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +00001127 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +00001128 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
1129 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
1130 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
1131 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
1132 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
1133 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
1134 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
1135 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
1136 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
1137 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
1138 + Updates to documentation.
1139
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +00001140- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
1141 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
1142 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
1143 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
1144
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +00001145- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001146
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +00001147- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
1148 applications should use the getmember function.
1149
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +00001150- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
1151
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +00001152- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
1153 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
1154 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
1155 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
1156 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
1157 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
1158 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
1159 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
1160 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
1161
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001162- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
1163 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +00001164 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001165
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +00001166- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
1167 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
1168 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
1169 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
1170 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
1171 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
1172 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
1173 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001174
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +00001175- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
1176 the new public features (of which there are many).
1177
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +00001178- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001179 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
1180 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
1181 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
1182 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +00001183 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001184
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +00001185- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
1186
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +00001187- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
1188 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
1189 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
1190 options.
1191
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +00001192- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
1193 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
1194 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
1195 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
1196 conditions under which non-string values work.
1197
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001198Build
1199-----
1200
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +00001201- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
1202 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
1203 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
1204
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +00001205- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
1206 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
1207 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
1208 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
1209 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001210
1211C API
1212-----
1213
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +00001214- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
1215 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
1216
1217- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
1218
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +00001219- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
1220 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
1221 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
1222 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
1223 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
1224 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
1225 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
1226 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
1227 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
1228
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +00001229- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
1230
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +00001231- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
1232 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
1233 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001234
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001235Tests
1236-----
1237
1238- test__locale ported to unittest
1239
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001240Mac
1241---
1242
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +00001243- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
1244 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
1245 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001246
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001247Tools/Demos
1248-----------
1249
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +00001250- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
1251 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
1252 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
1253 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
1254 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001255
1256
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001257What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
1258=================================
1259
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +00001260*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001261
1262Core and builtins
1263-----------------
1264
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001265- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001266 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
1267
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001268- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
1269 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
1270 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
1271 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
1272 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
1273 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
1274 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
1275 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001276 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
1277 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
1278 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
1279 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
1280 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001281
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +00001282- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
1283 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
1284 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
1285 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
1286 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
1287
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +00001288- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
1289
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +00001290- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
1291 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
1292
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +00001293- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
1294 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
1295 modified the list.
1296
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +00001297- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
1298 functions is now writable.
1299
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +00001300- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
1301 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
1302 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
1303 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
1304
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001305- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
1306 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
1307 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
1308 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
1309 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +00001310
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +00001311- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
1312 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
1313
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001314Extension modules
1315-----------------
1316
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001317- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
1318
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +00001319- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
1320 data.
1321
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001322- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
1323 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
1324 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
1325 supposed to have been truncated away.
1326
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +00001327- Added socket.socketpair().
1328
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +00001329- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
1330 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
1331
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001332- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +00001333 versions of Python, have now been removed.
1334
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001335Library
1336-------
1337
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001338- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001339 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001340
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +00001341- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
1342 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
1343
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +00001344- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
1345 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
1346
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001347- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
1348
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +00001349- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
1350 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +00001351
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +00001352- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
1353 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
1354
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +00001355- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
1356
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +00001357- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
1358
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +00001359- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
1360
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +00001361- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
1362 Percivall.
1363
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +00001364- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
1365 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
1366
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001367- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
1368 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
1369 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001370 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001371
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001372- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
1373 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
1374 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
1375 and exponent.
1376
1377- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
1378
1379- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +00001380 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001381 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
1382
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001383- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
1384 to the readline module.
1385
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001386- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001387 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
1388 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001389
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +00001390- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
1391 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
1392 contains symlinks.
1393
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +00001394- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
1395 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
1396
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +00001397- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
1398 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
1399 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1400
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001401- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
1402 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
1403 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
1404 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
1405 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
1406 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
1407 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
1408 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
1409 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
1410 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
1411 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
1412 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
1413 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
1414
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +00001415- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
1416
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001417Tools/Demos
1418-----------
1419
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001420- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
1421 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
1422
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +00001423- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
1424
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001425Build
1426-----
1427
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001428- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
1429 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
1430 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
1431 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
1432 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
1433 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
1434 plans to do so.
1435
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +00001436- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
1437 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
1438
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +00001439- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
1440 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
1441
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001442- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
1443 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
1444
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +00001445- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
1446 GNU/k*BSD systems.
1447
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +00001448- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
1449 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
1450
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001451C API
1452-----
1453
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001454..
1455
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001456Documentation
1457-------------
1458
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001459- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1460 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1461
1462- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1463 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1464 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001465
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001466New platforms
1467-------------
1468
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001469- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1470
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001471Tests
1472-----
1473
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001474..
1475
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001476Windows
1477-------
1478
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001479- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1480 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1481 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1482 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1483 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1484 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1485 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1486 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1487 the problem.
1488
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001489Mac
1490---
1491
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001492..
1493
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001494
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001495What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1496=================================
1497
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001498*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001499
1500Core and builtins
1501-----------------
1502
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001503- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1504 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1505 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1506 sensitive code.
1507
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001508- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001509 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001510
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001511 @staticmethod
1512 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001513
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001514 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001515
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001516- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1517 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1518 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1519 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1520 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1521 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1522 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1523 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1524 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1525 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1526 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1527
1528 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1529 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1530 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1531 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1532 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1533 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1534 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1535
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001536- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1537 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1538
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001539- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001540 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001541
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001542- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001543 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001544 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1545
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001546- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001547 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1548 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1549
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001550- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1551 types that support garbage collection.
1552
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001553- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1554
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001555- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1556 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1557 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1558 Jython.
1559
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001560- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1561
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001562- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1563 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1564
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001565- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1566 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1567 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001568
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001569- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1570 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1571 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1572
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001573Extension modules
1574-----------------
1575
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001576- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1577
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001578Library
1579-------
1580
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001581- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1582 TIS-620
1583
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001584- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1585 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1586 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1587 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1588 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1589 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1590 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1591 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1592 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1593 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1594
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001595- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1596
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001597- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1598 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1599 same as when the argument is omitted).
1600 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1601
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001602- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1603
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001604- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1605 schemes are offered.
1606
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001607- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1608
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001609- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1610 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1611 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1612
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001613- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1614
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001615- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1616 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1617
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001618- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1619 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1620 when dummy_threading is being used.
1621
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001622- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1623 from a tarfile.
1624
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001625- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001626 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001627
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001628- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1629 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1630 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1631 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1632
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001633- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1634 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1635
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001636- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1637 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1638 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1639 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1640 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1641 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1642 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1643 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1644 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1645 by some other method in progress).
1646
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001647- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1648 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1649 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001650
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001651- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1652
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001653- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1654 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1655 AM Kuchling.
1656
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001657- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1658 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1659 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1660
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001661- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1662 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1663 instead of unsigned.
1664
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001665- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001666 no longer part of the public API.
1667
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001668- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1669 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1670 string methods of the same name).
1671
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001672- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001673 SF patch 945642.
1674
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001675- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1676
1677 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1678
1679 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1680 DocTestSuites.
1681
1682- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1683 that provide thread-local data.
1684
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001685- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1686 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1687
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001688- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1689
1690- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1691 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1692 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1693
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001694- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1695
1696 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1697 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1698 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001699
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001700 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1701 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1702 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1703 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1704
1705 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1706 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1707
1708 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1709 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1710 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1711 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1712
1713 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1714 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1715 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1716 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1717 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1718
1719 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1720 wrapping help output.
1721
1722 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1723 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1724 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001725
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001726C API
1727-----
1728
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001729- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1730 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1731 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1732 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1733 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1734 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1735 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1736 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1737 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1738 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1739 its visible semantics have not changed.
1740
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001741- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1742 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1743
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001744Documentation
1745-------------
1746
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001747- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001748
1749 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001750 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001751
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001752 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001753
1754 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1755
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001756- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001757
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001758Tests
1759-----
1760
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001761- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001762 platforms that use the Makefile.
1763
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001764- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1765 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1766 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1767
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001768
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001769What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1770=================================
1771
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001772*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001773
1774Core and builtins
1775-----------------
1776
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001777- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1778 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1779 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1780 objects now (one object instead of three).
1781
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001782- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1783 Windows DLLs.
1784
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001785- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1786 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001787
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001788- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1789 a new .pyc magic.
1790
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001791- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1792 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1793 be there.
1794
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001795- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1796 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1797 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1798
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001799- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1800 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1801 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1802
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001803- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1804
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001805- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1806 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1807 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001808
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001809- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1810 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1811
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001812- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1813
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001814- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001815 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001816
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001817- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1818
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001819- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1820
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001821- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1822 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1823
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001824- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1825 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1826 Fixes bug #858016 .
1827
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001828- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1829 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1830 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1831
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001832- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1833 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1834 improves their performance (about 35%).
1835
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001836- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1837 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1838 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1839
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001840- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1841 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1842 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1843 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1844
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001845- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1846 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001847 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001848 length is not known).
1849
1850- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1851 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001852 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1853 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001854 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1855
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001856- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1857 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1858
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001859- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1860 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1861 keyword arguments.
1862
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001863- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1864 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1865 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1866
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001867- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1868 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1869 cases.
1870
1871- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1872 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1873 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1874 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1875 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1876 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1877 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1878 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1879 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1880 a release build.
1881
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001882- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1883 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1884
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001885- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001886 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001887
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001888- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1889 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1890 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1891 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1892 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1893 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1894 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1895 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1896 destroyed.
1897
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001898- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1899 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1900 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1901 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1902 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1903 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1904 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1905 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1906
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001907- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1908 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1909 character other than a space.
1910
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001911- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1912 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1913 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1914 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1915 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1916 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1917 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1918 attributes with the same name.
1919
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001920- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1921 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1922 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1923 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1924 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1925 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1926 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1927 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1928 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1929 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1930 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1931 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1932 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1933 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001934
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001935- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1936 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1937 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1938 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1939 This has been repaired.
1940
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001941- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1942
1943- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1944
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001945- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1946 over a sequence.
1947
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001948- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001949 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001950
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001951- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1952
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001953- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1954 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1955 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1956 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1957 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1958 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1959 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1960 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1961
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001962- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1963 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1964 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1965
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001966- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1967 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1968 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1969 freelist.
1970
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001971- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1972 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1973
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001974- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1975 number.
1976
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001977- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1978 a TypeError exception.
1979
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001980- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1981 820195.
1982
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001983- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1984 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1985 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1986
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001987- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001988 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1989 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001990
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001991- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1992 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1993 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1994
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001995- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1996 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001997 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001998
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001999- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00002000 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
2001 the first call.
2002
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00002003
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002004Extension modules
2005-----------------
2006
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00002007- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
2008 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
2009
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00002010- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
2011 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
2012 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
2013 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
2014 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
2015 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
2016 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00002017
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00002018- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
2019
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00002020- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
2021
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00002022- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
2023 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
2024
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00002025- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
2026 fewer false positives.
2027
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00002028- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
2029 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
2030
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002031- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00002032 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
2033
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00002034- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002035 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00002036 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00002037 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
2038 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00002039
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00002040- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
2041 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
2042 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
2043 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
2044
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00002045- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
2046 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
2047 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
2048 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
2049 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
2050 #897625.
2051
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00002052- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
2053 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
2054
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00002055- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
2056 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
2057 and pops on either side of the deque.
2058
2059- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
2060 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
2061
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00002062- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
2063 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
2064 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
2065 other functions that expect a function argument.
2066
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00002067- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
2068
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00002069- os.getsid was added.
2070
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00002071- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
2072 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
2073 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
2074
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00002075- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
2076
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00002077- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
2078
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00002079- readline.clear_history was added.
2080
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00002081- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
2082
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00002083- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
2084
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00002085- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
2086
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00002087- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
2088
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00002089- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
2090
2091- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
2092
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00002093- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
2094
2095- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
2096
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00002097- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
2098 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
2099 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
2100
2101- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
2102 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
2103 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
2104 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
2105 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
2106 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
2107 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
2108
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00002109- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
2110 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
2111 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
2112 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00002113
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002114- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00002115 iterators from a single iterable.
2116
2117- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
2118 of raising a TypeError exception.
2119
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00002120- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
2121 as parameter.
2122
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002123Library
2124-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00002125
Armin Rigoa871ef22006-02-08 12:53:56 +00002126- Added a new module: cProfile, a C profiler with the same interface as the
2127 profile module. cProfile avoids some of the drawbacks of the hotshot
2128 profiler and provides a bit more information than the other two profilers.
2129 Based on "lsprof" (patch #1212837).
2130
Georg Brandlf0de6a12005-08-22 18:02:59 +00002131- Bug #1266283: The new function "lexists" is now in os.path.__all__.
2132
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00002133- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
2134 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
2135 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002136
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00002137- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
2138 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
2139 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00002140
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00002141- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00002142
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00002143- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
2144 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00002145
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00002146- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
2147 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
2148
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00002149- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
2150
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00002151- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00002152 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00002153
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002154- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00002155 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002156
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00002157- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
2158
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00002159- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
2160 on cygwin and mingw32.
2161
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00002162- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
2163
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00002164- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
2165 module.
2166
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00002167- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
2168 installation scheme for all platforms.
2169
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00002170- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00002171 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00002172
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00002173- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
2174 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
2175 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
2176
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00002177- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
2178 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
2179 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
2180
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00002181- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
2182
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00002183- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
2184
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00002185- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
2186 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
2187
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00002188- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
2189 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
2190 type pattern with the same value exists.
2191
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00002192- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
2193 when run from the command prompt).
2194
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00002195- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
2196 not taken into consideration when caching value.
2197
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00002198- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
2199 default sort).
2200
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00002201- Added global runctx function to profile module
2202
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00002203- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
2204
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00002205- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
2206
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00002207- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
2208
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002209- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00002210 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
2211 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
2212 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
2213 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
2214 accordingly.
2215
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00002216- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
2217 decoding standards.
2218
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00002219- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
2220 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
2221 called for all requests.
2222
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00002223- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
2224 they are passed to the compiler.
2225
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00002226- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
2227 indent, width and depth.
2228
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00002229- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
2230 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
2231
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00002232- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
2233 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
2234
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00002235- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
2236
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00002237- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
2238
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00002239- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
2240
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00002241- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
2242 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
2243
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00002244- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00002245 for better performance.
2246
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002247- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00002248
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00002249- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
2250 a string).
2251
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00002252- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
2253
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00002254- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
2255
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00002256- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
2257
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00002258- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
2259
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00002260- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
2261 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
2262 list of fieldnames.
2263
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00002264- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
2265 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
2266
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00002267- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
2268
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00002269- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
2270 empty lists.
2271
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00002272- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
2273 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
2274 and shelves.
2275
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00002276- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
2277 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
2278
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002279- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00002280 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
2281 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002282
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00002283- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
2284 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00002285 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00002286
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002287- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00002288 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
2289 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
2290
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002291- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
2292 and removed in Py2.4.
2293
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00002294- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
2295
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00002296- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
2297
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002298Tools/Demos
2299-----------
2300
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00002301- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
2302 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
2303
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00002304- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
2305
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00002306- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
2307 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
2308 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
2309 destination in situations where both files are given.
2310
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00002311- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
2312 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
2313 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
2314 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
2315
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00002316- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
2317
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00002318- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
2319 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
2320 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
2321 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
2322 now.
2323
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002324- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
2325 in effect
2326
2327- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
2328 C-c C-h
2329
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00002330- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
2331 -d option was given.
2332
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002333Build
2334-----
2335
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00002336- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
2337 build under OS X.
2338
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00002339- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
2340 --enable-profiling.
2341
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00002342- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
2343 is configured --with-tsc.
2344
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00002345- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
2346 on AMD64.
2347
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00002348- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
2349 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
2350
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00002351- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
2352 removed.
2353
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00002354- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
2355 supported (see PEP 11).
2356
2357- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
2358
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00002359- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
2360
2361- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
2362 (see PEP 11).
2363
2364- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
2365 sizeof(char) must be 1.
2366
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002367C API
2368-----
2369
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00002370- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
2371 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
2372 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
2373
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00002374- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
2375 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
2376 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
2377 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
2378
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00002379- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
2380 generator objects.
2381
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002382- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
2383 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00002384 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
2385 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002386
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00002387- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
2388 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
2389
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00002390- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
2391 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
2392 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
2393 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
2394 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
2395
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00002396- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
2397 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
2398 about 10% faster.
2399
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00002400- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
2401 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
2402
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00002403- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
2404 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
2405 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
2406 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
2407
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002408Windows
2409-------
2410
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00002411- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
2412 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
2413 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
2414 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
2415
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00002416- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
2417 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
2418 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
2419
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002420
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002421What's New in Python 2.3 final?
2422===============================
2423
2424*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
2425
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002426IDLE
2427----
2428
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00002429- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
2430 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
2431 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
2432 context-menu actions.
2433
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002434- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
2435 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
2436 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
2437 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
2438 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
2439 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
2440 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
2441 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
2442 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
2443
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002444
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002445What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
2446=============================================
2447
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00002448*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002449
2450Core and builtins
2451-----------------
2452
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002453- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002454 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002455 comment at the end are still unsupported.
2456
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002457Extension modules
2458-----------------
2459
2460- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
2461 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
2462 than once. This has been fixed.
2463
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002464- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2465 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2466 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2467 call.
2468
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002469- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2470
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002471Library
2472-------
2473
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002474- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2475 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2476
2477- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2478 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2479 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2480 restored.
2481
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002482IDLE
2483----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002484
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002485- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002486
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002487Build
2488-----
2489
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002490- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2491 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2492
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002493C API
2494-----
2495
2496Windows
2497-------
2498
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002499- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2500 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2501
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002502- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2503
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002504Mac
2505---
2506
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002507- Various fixes to pimp.
2508
2509- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2510
2511- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2512 more problems than it solves.
2513
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002514
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002515What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2516=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002517
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002518*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2519
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002520Core and builtins
2521-----------------
2522
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002523- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2524 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2525
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002526- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2527 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002528 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002529
2530- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2531 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2532 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002533 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002534
2535- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2536 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002537
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002538- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2539 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2540 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2541
2542- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002543 770247.
2544
2545- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002546
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002547Extension modules
2548-----------------
2549
2550- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2551 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2552
2553- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2554
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002555- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2556
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002557- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2558 contained within the _strptime module.
2559
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002560- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2561 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2562
2563- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002564 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2565
2566- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2567 the find_class attribute, if present.
2568
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002569- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002570
2571 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2572 (SF bug 763298).
2573
2574 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002575 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2576 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2577 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002578
2579 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2580
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002581Library
2582-------
2583
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002584- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2585
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002586- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2587 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2588 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2589 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2590 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2591 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2592 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2593 or Tester().
2594
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002595- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2596 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2597 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2598 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2599 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2600 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2601 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2602 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2603 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002604
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002605 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002606
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002607- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2608 weren't before was an oversight.
2609
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002610- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2611 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2612
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002613- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2614 when there are no lines.
2615
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002616- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2617 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2618
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002619- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2620 to child processes.
2621
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002622- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2623
2624- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2625
2626- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2627 xmlrpclib.
2628
2629- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2630 responses.
2631
2632- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2633 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2634
2635- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2636 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2637 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2638
2639- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2640 used as patterns.
2641
2642- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2643 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2644 than Tk 8.3.
2645
2646- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2647
2648- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002649
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002650Tools/Demos
2651-----------
2652
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002653- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2654
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002655- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2656
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002657- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002658
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002659Build
2660-----
2661
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002662- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2663
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002664- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2665
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002666- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2667 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002668
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002669- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2670 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2671 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002672
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002673C API
2674-----
2675
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002676- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2677 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2678
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002679Windows
2680-------
2681
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002682- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2683 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2684 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2685 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2686 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2687 Python exception ::
2688
2689 thread.error: can't start new thread
2690
2691 is raised now.
2692
2693- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2694 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2695 instead of from DLL teardown.
2696
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002697Mac
2698---
2699
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002700- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002701 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002702 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2703 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2704 the executable in the bundle.
2705
2706- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002707
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002708- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2709
2710- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2711 on Panther.
2712
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002713What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2714================================
2715
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002716*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002717
2718Core and builtins
2719-----------------
2720
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002721- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2722 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2723 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2724 with the -i option.
2725
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002726- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2727 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2728
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002729- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2730 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2731
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002732- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2733 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2734 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2735 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2736 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2737 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2738 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2739 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2740 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2741 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2742 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2743 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2744 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002745
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002746- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2747 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2748 embedded in a lambda expression.
2749
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002750- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2751 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2752 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2753 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2754 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2755
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002756- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2757 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2758 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2759
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002760- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2761 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2762
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002763- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2764 It's writable again.
2765
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002766- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2767 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2768 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002769 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002770
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002771- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2772 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2773 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2774
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002775Extension modules
2776-----------------
2777
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002778- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2779 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2780
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002781- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2782 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2783 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2784 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2785
2786- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2787 collection.
2788
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002789- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2790 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2791 unique within a single program run.
2792
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002793- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2794 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2795
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002796- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2797 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2798
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002799- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2800 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002801
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002802- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2803
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002804- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2805 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2806
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002807- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2808 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2809 for many BSD-derived systems.
2810
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002811
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002812Library
2813-------
2814
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002815- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2816 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2817 primary ones:
2818
2819 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2820 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2821 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2822
2823 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2824 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2825 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2826 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2827 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2828 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2829
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002830- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2831 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2832 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2833 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2834 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2835 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2836 argument.
2837
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002838- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2839 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2840 in the archive.
2841
2842- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2843 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2844
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002845- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2846 569574).
2847
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002848- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2849 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2850 no more.
2851
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002852- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2853 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2854 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2855 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2856 code coverage.
2857
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002858- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2859 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2860 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002861 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2862 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002863
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002864- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2865 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2866 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002867 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002868
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002869- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2870
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002871- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2872 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2873 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2874 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2875
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002876- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2877 handling.
2878
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002879- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2880 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2881
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002882- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2883 in socket.py.
2884
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002885- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2886
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002887- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2888 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2889 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2890 opener with proxy support.
2891
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002892- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2893
2894- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2895
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002896Tools/Demos
2897-----------
2898
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002899- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2900
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002901- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2902
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002903- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2904 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002905
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002906- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2907 files.
2908
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002909Build
2910-----
2911
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002912- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002913 different root directory.
2914
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002915C API
2916-----
2917
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002918- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2919 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2920 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2921 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2922 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2923 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2924 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2925 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2926 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2927 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2928
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002929- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2930 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2931 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2932 from Python.
2933
2934
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002935New platforms
2936-------------
2937
2938None this time.
2939
2940Tests
2941-----
2942
2943- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2944 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2945
2946Windows
2947-------
2948
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002949- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2950
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002951- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2952 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2953 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2954 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2955 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2956 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2957 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2958 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2959 that's what it's for.
2960
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002961Mac
2962---
2963
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002964- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2965 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2966 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2967 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002968- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2969 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2970- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002971
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002972SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2973------------------------------------
2974
2975430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2976598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2977622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2978661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2979683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2980697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2981713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2982724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2983727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2984729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2985730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2986731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2987732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2988733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2989735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2990740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2991744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2992745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2993747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2994749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2995751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2996753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2997755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2998757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2999760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
3000
3001
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003002What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
3003================================
3004
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00003005*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003006
3007Core and builtins
3008-----------------
3009
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00003010- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
3011 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
3012
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00003013- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
3014 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
3015 and cannot be strings).
3016
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00003017- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
3018 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
3019 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
3020 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
3021
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00003022- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
3023 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
3024 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
3025 Python itself.
3026
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00003027- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
3028 the referenced object, if it has one.
3029
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00003030- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
3031 the thread started at
3032 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
3033
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00003034- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
3035 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
3036 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
3037 placed on a list index.
3038
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00003039- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
3040 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
3041 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
3042 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
3043
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003044- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
3045 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
3046 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
3047 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
3048 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
3049 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
3050 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
3051
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00003052- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
3053 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
3054 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
3055 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
3056 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
3057
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00003058- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
3059 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00003060
3061- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
3062 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
3063 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
3064 #693195.)
3065
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00003066- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
3067 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003068
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00003069- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00003070 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00003071 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
3072 interpreter executions, would fail.
3073
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00003074- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00003075 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00003076 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00003077
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003078Extension modules
3079-----------------
3080
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00003081- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
3082 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
3083 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
3084 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
3085
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00003086- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
3087 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
3088
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00003089- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
3090 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
3091 and Greg Chapman.)
3092
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00003093- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
3094 recursively.
3095
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00003096- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00003097 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
3098 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
3099 leaks.
3100
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00003101- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
3102
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00003103- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
3104 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
3105 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
3106 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
3107 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
3108 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
3109 #705836.
3110
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00003111- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00003112 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
3113
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00003114- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
3115 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
3116 See SF bug #692416.
3117
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00003118- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
3119 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
3120
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00003121- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
3122 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
3123 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003124
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00003125- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00003126 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
3127 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
3128
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00003129- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
3130 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
3131 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
3132 timeouts to work properly.
3133
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003134Library
3135-------
3136
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00003137- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
3138 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
3139 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
3140 future release.
3141
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00003142- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
3143 for querying platform dependent features.
3144
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00003145- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00003146
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00003147- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
3148 pickle protocol versions.
3149
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00003150- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
3151 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
3152 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
3153
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00003154- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
3155
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00003156- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
3157 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
3158 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
3159 modules.
3160
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00003161- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
3162 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
3163 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
3164
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00003165- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
3166 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
3167
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00003168- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
3169 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
3170 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
3171
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003172- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00003173 MS Office extensions.
3174
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00003175- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
3176 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
3177
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00003178- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
3179 execution speed of expressions and statements.
3180
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003181- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
3182 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
3183 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
3184 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
3185 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
3186 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
3187
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00003188- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
3189 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
3190 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003191
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00003192- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
3193 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
3194 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
3195
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00003196- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
3197
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00003198- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
3199 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
3200 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
3201
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003202Tools/Demos
3203-----------
3204
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00003205- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
3206 See the module docstring for details.
3207
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003208Build
3209-----
3210
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00003211- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
3212 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003213
3214C API
3215-----
3216
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003217- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
3218
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00003219- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
3220 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
3221 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
3222
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003223- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
3224 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00003225
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003226 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
3227 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
3228 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00003229
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00003230- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00003231 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
3232
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00003233- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
3234 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
3235 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003236
3237New platforms
3238-------------
3239
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00003240None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003241
3242Tests
3243-----
3244
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00003245- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
3246 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003247
3248Windows
3249-------
3250
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00003251- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
3252 function.
3253
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00003254- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
3255 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003256
3257Mac
3258---
3259
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00003260- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
3261 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00003262
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00003263- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
3264 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003265
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00003266- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
3267 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
3268 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003269
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003270- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00003271 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
3272 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003273
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003274- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
3275 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003276
3277
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003278What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
3279=================================
3280
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003281*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003282
3283Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003284-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003285
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00003286- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
3287 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
3288 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
3289
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00003290- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
3291 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
3292 (SF patch #664376.)
3293
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003294- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
3295 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
3296 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
3297 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
3298 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
3299 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00003300 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003301
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003302- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
3303 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
3304 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
3305 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003306 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003307
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00003308- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
3309 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
3310 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
3311 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
3312 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
3313 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
3314 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
3315 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
3316 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
3317 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
3318 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
3319
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00003320- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
3321 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
3322 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
3323 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
3324 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
3325 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
3326
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00003327- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
3328 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
3329
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00003330- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
3331 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
3332 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
3333 case.)
3334
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00003335- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
3336 passed as unicode strings.
3337
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00003338- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
3339 See SF bug #683467.
3340
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00003341- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
3342 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
3343
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00003344- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
3345
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00003346- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
3347
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00003348- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
3349 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
3350 arguments.
3351
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00003352- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
3353 See SF bug #667147.
3354
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003355- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003356 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003357 See SF bug #676155.
3358
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003359- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003360 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003361 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
3362 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
3363 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
3364 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
3365 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
3366 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003367
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003368Extension modules
3369-----------------
3370
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003371- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
3372 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3373 tp_as_number pointer.
3374
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003375- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
3376 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
3377 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
3378 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
3379 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
3380
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003381- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
3382
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00003383- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
3384
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003385- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00003386 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003387 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
3388 patch #678531.)
3389
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00003390- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
3391 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
3392
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00003393- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
3394 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
3395
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00003396- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
3397
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00003398- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
3399 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
3400 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
3401
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003402- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
3403
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003404- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
3405 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
3406
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003407- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003408
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003409- datetime changes:
3410
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00003411 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
3412
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003413 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
3414 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
3415 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
3416 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
3417 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
3418 now.
3419
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003420 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003421 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
3422 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003423
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003424 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003425 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003426 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
3427 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
3428 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
3429 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003430
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003431 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
3432 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
3433 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003434 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
3435
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003436 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
3437 by a later example coded by Guido.
3438
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003439 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003440 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
3441 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
3442 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003443 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
3444 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
3445
3446 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
3447 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
3448 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
3449 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
3450 tzinfo subclass instance.
3451
3452 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
3453 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
3454 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
3455 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
3456 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
3457 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
3458 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
3459 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003460
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003461 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
3462 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3463 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3464 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3465 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003466 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3467
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003468 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003469
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003470 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3471 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3472 as a naive datetime object.
3473
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003474 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3475 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3476 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3477
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003478 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3479 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3480 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3481 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3482 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3483 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3484 comparison.
3485
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003486 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3487 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3488 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3489 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003490 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003491
3492 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003493
3494 and ::
3495
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003496 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3497
3498 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3499 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3500 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3501 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3502
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003503 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3504 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3505 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3506 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3507 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3508
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003509 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3510 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003511 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3512 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003513
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003514Library
3515-------
3516
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003517- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3518 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3519
3520- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3521 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3522 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3523 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3524 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3525 See PEP 307 for details.
3526
3527- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3528 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3529
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003530- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3531 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003532 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003533 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3534 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003535 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003536
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003537- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3538 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3539
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003540- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3541 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3542 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3543
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003544- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3545
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003546- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3547 exception.
3548
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003549- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3550 class.
3551
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003552- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3553 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3554 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3555
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003556- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3557 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3558
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003559- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003560 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3561 See SF bug #659228.
3562
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003563- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3564 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3565 See SF patch #651082.
3566
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003567- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003568
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003569- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3570 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3571
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003572- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003573 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003574
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003575- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3576 DOS paths from other platforms.
3577
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003578Tools/Demos
3579-----------
3580
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003581- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3582 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3583 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3584 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3585 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3586 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3587 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3588 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3589 example:
3590
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003591 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3592 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003593
3594 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3595
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003596
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003597Build
3598-----
3599
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003600- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3601 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3602 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003603 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3604
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003605 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3606
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003607- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3608 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3609 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3610 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3611 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3612 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3613 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3614 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3615 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3616
3617- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3618 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3619 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3620 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3621
3622- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3623 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3624
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003625C API
3626-----
3627
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003628- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3629 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003630
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003631- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3632 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3633 tp_as_number pointer.
3634
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003635- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3636 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3637 (SF #681367)
3638
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003639- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3640 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3641 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3642 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003643
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003644Tests
3645-----
3646
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003647- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003648 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3649 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3650 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3651 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3652 pydoc.)
3653
3654- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3655
3656- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003657
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003658Windows
3659-------
3660
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003661- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3662 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3663 time).
3664
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003665- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3666 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3667
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003668- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3669 release without strong cryptography.
3670
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003671- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003672 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003673
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003674- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3675 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3676
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003677Mac
3678---
3679
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003680- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3681 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003682
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003683- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3684 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3685 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003686
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003687- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3688 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003689
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003690- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3691 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3692 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3693 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003694
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003695- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003696 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3697 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3698 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003699
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003700
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003701What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003702=================================
3703
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003704*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003705
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003706Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003707--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003708
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003709- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3710
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003711- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3712 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003713 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003714 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003715 a different meaning than before.
3716
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003717- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003718 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003719 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003720
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003721- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003722 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003723 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003724
3725- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3726 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3727 and deallocation.
3728
3729- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3730 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3731
3732- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3733 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3734 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3735 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3736 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3737
3738- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3739 now detected by the garbage collector.
3740
3741- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3742 [SF bug 519621]
3743
3744- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3745 identifier.
3746
3747- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3748 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3749 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3750 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3751 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3752 [SF bug 563060]
3753
3754- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3755 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3756 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3757 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3758 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3759
3760- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3761 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3762 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3763
3764- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3765
3766- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3767 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3768 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3769 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3770 state of the slots would be lost.)
3771
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003772Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003773-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003774
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003775- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003776 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3777 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3778 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3779 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003780 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3781 Jython 2.1.
3782
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003783- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003784 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003785 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3786 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3787 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3788 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3789 these, see PEP 302.
3790
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003791- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3792 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3793 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3794
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003795- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3796 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3797 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3798
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003799- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3800 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3801 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3802
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003803- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3804 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3805 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3806 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3807 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3808 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3809 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3810 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3811 releases or implementations.
3812
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003813- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003814 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3815 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003816
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003817- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3818 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3819
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003820- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3821 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3822 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3823
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003824- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3825 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3826
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003827- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3828 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003829 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3830 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003831
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003832- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3833 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3834 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3835 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3836 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3837
3838 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3839 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3840 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3841 pattern.
3842
3843 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3844 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3845 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3846 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3847
3848 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3849 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3850 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3851 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3852 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3853 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3854
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003855- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3856 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3857 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3858 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3859 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3860 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3861 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3862 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003863
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003864- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3865 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3866 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3867 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3868 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003869 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3870 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3871 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3872 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3873 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3874 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3875 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003876
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003877- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3878 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3879
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003880- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3881 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3882 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3883 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3884 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3885 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3886 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3887 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3888 to Zack Weinberg!
3889
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003890- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3891 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3892 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3893 type. This has been fixed now.
3894
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003895- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3896 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3897 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3898
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003899- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3900 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3901 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3902 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3903 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3904 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3905 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3906 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003907 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003908
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003909- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3910 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3911 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003912
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003913- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3914 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3915 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3916 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3917 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3918 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3919 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3920 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003921 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003922 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3923 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3924
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003925- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3926 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3927 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3928 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3929 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3930 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3931 this.)
3932
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003933- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3934 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003935 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003936 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003937 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3938 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003939 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3940 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003941
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003942- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3943 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3944 currently running.
3945
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003946- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3947 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3948 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3949 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3950
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003951- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3952 as directory names.
3953
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003954- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3955 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3956
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003957- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3958 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3959
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003960- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003961 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3962 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003963
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003964- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3965 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3966 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3967 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3968 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3969
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003970- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3971 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3972 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3973 removed.
3974
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003975- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3976 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3977 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3978
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003979- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3980 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3981 to __debug__.
3982
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003983- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3984 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3985 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3986
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003987- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3988 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3989 deprecated now.
3990
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003991- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3992 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3993 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003994
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003995- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3996 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3997 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3998 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3999 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00004000
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00004001- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
4002 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
4003
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00004004- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
4005 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
4006 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004007 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00004008 is backward compatible.
4009
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00004010- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
4011 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
4012 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
4013 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
4014 could access a pointer to freed memory.
4015
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00004016- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
4017 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
4018 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
4019 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
4020 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
4021 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004022
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00004023- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
4024 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
4025
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004026- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
4027 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
4028
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004029- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
4030 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
4031 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
4032 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
4033 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
4034
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00004035- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
4036 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
4037 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
4038
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004039- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00004040 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
4041
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00004042- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
4043 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
4044 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00004045
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00004046- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
4047 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
4048
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00004049- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
4050 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
4051 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
4052
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00004053- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
4054
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004055Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004056-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004057
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00004058- Added three operators to the operator module:
4059 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
4060 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
4061 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
4062
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00004063- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
4064
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00004065- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
4066 archives.
4067
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004068- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
4069 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
4070 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
4071
4072 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
4073
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00004074- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
4075 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
4076 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00004077 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00004078
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00004079- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
4080 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
4081 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
4082 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00004083 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
4084 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
4085 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
4086 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00004087
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00004088- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
4089 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00004090
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00004091- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
4092
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00004093- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
4094 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
4095
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00004096- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
4097 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
4098 supported.
4099
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00004100- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
4101
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00004102- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
4103 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00004104
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00004105- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
4106 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
4107
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00004108- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
4109
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00004110- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
4111 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
4112
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00004113- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
4114 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
4115 functions but callable type objects.
4116
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004117- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00004118 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004119 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00004120
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00004121- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
4122 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00004123
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00004124- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
4125 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00004126
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00004127- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
4128 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
4129 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
4130 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
4131
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00004132- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
4133 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00004134
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00004135- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
4136 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
4137 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
4138 and __imul__.
4139
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00004140- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00004141 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
4142 is called.
4143
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00004144- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
4145 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
4146 interpreter was compiled.
4147
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00004148- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
4149 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
4150 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004151 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00004152 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
4153 1, not 2.
4154
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00004155- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
4156 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
4157 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
4158 limit.
4159
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00004160- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
4161 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
4162 bug #623464.
4163
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00004164- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
4165 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
4166 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
4167 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
4168
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004169Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004170-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004171
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00004172- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
4173
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00004174- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
4175 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
4176 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
4177 with Python 2.3a2.
4178
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00004179- os.path exposes getctime.
4180
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004181- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004182 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004183 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004184 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004185 unit tests of floating point results.
4186
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00004187- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
4188 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
4189 has been increased.
4190
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00004191- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
4192 executed.
4193
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00004194- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
4195 postinstallation script.
4196
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00004197- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
4198 test the current module.
4199
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004200- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00004201 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
4202 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
4203 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
4204 this behavior needs to be controlled.
4205
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00004206- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00004207 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00004208 Ward's Optik package.
4209
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00004210- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
4211 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
4212 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
4213 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
4214
4215- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
4216 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00004217 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00004218
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00004219- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
4220 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
4221 shelf are binary pickles.
4222
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00004223- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
4224 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
4225
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00004226- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
4227 modules are iterators now.
4228
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00004229- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
4230 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
4231 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
4232 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
4233 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
4234 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004235
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00004236- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
4237 with their entity value.
4238
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00004239- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
4240
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004241- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
4242 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00004243
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004244- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
4245 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004246 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00004247
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00004248- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
4249 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
4250 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
4251 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
4252 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
4253 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
4254 main():
4255
4256 import locale
4257 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
4258
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00004259- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
4260 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
4261
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00004262- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
4263 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
4264 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
4265 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
4266 to the new standard.
4267
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00004268- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
4269 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
4270 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
4271 an extension to the database.
4272
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004273- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
4274 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
4275 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
4276 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00004277 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004278
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004279- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00004280 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004281
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00004282- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
4283 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
4284 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
4285 bounded integers.
4286
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00004287- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
4288 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
4289 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
4290 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
4291 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
4292 in existence.
4293
4294 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
4295 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
4296 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
4297 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
4298 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
4299 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
4300
4301 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
4302 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
4303 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
4304 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
4305
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00004306- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
4307 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
4308 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
4309
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00004310- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
4311
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004312- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
4313 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
4314 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
4315 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
4316
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00004317- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
4318 argument.
4319
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00004320- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
4321 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
4322 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
4323 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
4324 [SF patch 560794].
4325
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004326- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
4327 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
4328 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00004329 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
4330 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
4331 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004332
4333- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
4334 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00004335
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00004336- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
4337 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
4338 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
4339 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00004340
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00004341- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
4342 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
4343 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
4344 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
4345 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
4346
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004347- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00004348
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00004349- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
4350
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00004351- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
4352 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
4353 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
4354 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
4355 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
4356 identical to None.
4357
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00004358- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
4359 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
4360 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
4361 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
4362 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
4363 results now.
4364
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00004365- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
4366 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
4367
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004368- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
4369 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
4370 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
4371 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
4372 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
4373 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
4374 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
4375 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
4376
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00004377- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
4378
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00004379- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
4380 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
4381
4382- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
4383 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
4384 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
4385 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
4386 and other systems.
4387
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004388- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
4389 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
4390 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
4391 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 +00004392 work well with these.
4393
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00004394- compileall now supports quiet operation.
4395
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004396- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00004397 connections.
4398
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00004399- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
4400 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
4401 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
4402
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00004403- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
4404 sets
4405
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00004406- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
4407 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
4408 name.
4409
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00004410- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
4411 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
4412 passed in.
4413
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004414- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00004415 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00004416 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
4417 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00004418
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00004419- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
4420
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00004421- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
4422
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00004423- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
4424 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
4425 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
4426
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004427- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
4428 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
4429 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
4430 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00004431 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004432
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004433- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004434 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004435 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004436
4437- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
4438 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
4439 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
4440
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004441- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00004442 the value of its expression argument.
4443
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004444- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
4445 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
4446 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
4447
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00004448- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
4449 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
4450 skipstone browser was included.
4451
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00004452- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
4453 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
4454
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004455Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004456-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004457
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00004458- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
4459 names in addition to accepting file names.
4460
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00004461- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
4462 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4463 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4464 still used and useful.)
4465
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004466- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4467 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4468 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4469 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004470
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004471- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4472 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4473 the generated binary.
4474
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004475Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004476-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004477
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004478- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4479
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004480- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4481 except in the hands of experts.
4482
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004483- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004484 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4485 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4486 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004487
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004488- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4489 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4490 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4491 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4492 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4493 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4494 builds.
4495
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004496- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4497 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4498 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4499 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4500 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4501 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4502 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4503 new type.
4504
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004505- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004506
4507 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4508 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4509 positive infinities.
4510
4511 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4512 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4513 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4514 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4515 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4516 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4517 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4518
4519 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4520
4521 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4522
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004523- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4524 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4525 size of the executable.
4526
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004527- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4528 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4529 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4530 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004531
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004532- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4533
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004534- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4535 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4536 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004537
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004538- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4539 well as Unix.
4540
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004541- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4542 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4543 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4544 modules in the README file for details.
4545
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004546C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004547-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004548
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004549- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4550 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004551 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004552 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004553 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004554
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004555- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4556 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4557 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4558 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4559 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4560 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004561 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004562 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4563 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4564 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4565 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4566 aligned.)
4567
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004568- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4569 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4570 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4571
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004572- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4573 level.
4574
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004575- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4576 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4577 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4578 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4579 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4580
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004581- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4582 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4583 code.
4584
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004585- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4586 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4587 adjusting for negative indices.
4588
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004589- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4590 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4591 object.
4592
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004593- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4594 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4595 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4596
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004597- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4598 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004599
4600- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4601
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004602- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4603 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4604 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4605 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4606
4607- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4608
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004609- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004610
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004611- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004612 without going through the buffer API.
4613
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004614- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004615
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004616- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4617 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4618 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4619 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4620
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004621- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4622 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4623
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004624- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004625 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4626
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004627New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004628-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004629
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004630- OpenVMS is now supported.
4631
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004632- AtheOS is now supported.
4633
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004634- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4635
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004636- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4637
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004638Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004639-----
4640
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004641- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4642 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4643 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004644
4645Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004646-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004647
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004648- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4649 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4650 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4651 bugs.
4652 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004653 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004654 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4655 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004656 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004657
4658- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004659 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004660
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004661- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4662 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4663
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004664- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4665 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004666 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004667 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4668
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004669- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4670 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4671 use files" uninstall option).
4672
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004673- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4674
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004675- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4676 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4677
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004678- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4679 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4680 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4681
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004682- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4683 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4684 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4685 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4686 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004687 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4688 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4689 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004690
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004691- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004692 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004693 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4694 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4695 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4696 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4697 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4698 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4699 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4700 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4701 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4702 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4703 work around.
4704
4705- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4706 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4707 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4708 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4709 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4710 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4711 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4712 specified with O_CREAT too).
4713
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004714Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004715----
4716
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004717- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004718
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004719- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4720 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4721 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4722
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004723- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4724 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4725 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4726
4727- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4728 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4729 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4730 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4731 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4732 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4733 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4734 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004735
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004736- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4737 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4738 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004739
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004740- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4741 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4742 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4743 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4744 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004745
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004746- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4747 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4748 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004749
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004750- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4751 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004752
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004753- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4754 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4755 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4756 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4757 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004758
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004759- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4760 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4761 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4762
4763- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4764 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4765 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004766
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004767- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4768 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4769 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4770 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004771 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004772
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004773- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4774 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004775
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004776- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4777 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004778
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004779- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004780 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004781 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4782 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004783
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004784
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004785What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004786===============================
4787
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004788*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4789
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004790Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004791--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004792
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004793- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4794 with a custom metaclass.
4795
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004796Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004797-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004798
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004799- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4800 are proxies.
4801
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004802Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004803-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004804
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004805- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4806 very short strings.
4807
4808- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4809 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4810 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4811 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4812 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4813
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004814Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004815-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004816
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004817- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4818 close or delete time).
4819
4820- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4821 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4822
4823- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4824
4825- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004826 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004827
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004828Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004829-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004830
4831Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004832-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004833
4834C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004835-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004836
4837New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004838-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004839
4840Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004841-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004842
4843Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004844-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004845
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004846- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4847
4848- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4849 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4850
4851- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4852 deleted at process exit time.
4853
4854- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4855 in backslash.
4856
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004857Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004858----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004859
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004860- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4861 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4862 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4863
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004864
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004865What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004866===========================
4867
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004868*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4869
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004870Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004871--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004872
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004873- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4874 been extensively updated. See
4875
4876 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4877
4878 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4879
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004880- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4881 deleted!
4882
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004883- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4884 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4885 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4886 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4887 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4888
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004889- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4890
4891 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4892 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4893
4894 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4895 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4896 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4897 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4898 supported anyway.
4899
4900 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4901 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4902
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004903- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4904 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4905 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4906 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4907 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004908
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004909- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4910 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4911 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4912
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004913Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004914-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004915
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004916- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4917 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4918 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4919 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4920 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4921 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004922 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4923 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4924 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4925 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004926
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004927- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4928 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4929 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4930
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004931Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004932-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004933
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004934- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4935
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004936Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004937-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004938
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004939- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4940 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4941 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4942 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4943 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4944 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4945
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004946- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4947
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004948- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4949
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004950- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4951
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004952- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4953 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4954 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4955
4956- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4957
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004958Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004959-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004960
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004961- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4962 off a search on Google.
4963
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004964Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004965-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004966
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004967- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4968 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4969 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4970 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4971 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4972 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4973 other platforms should do likewise.
4974
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004975- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4976 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4977 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4978
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004979C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004980-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004981
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004982- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4983 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4984 producing key-value pairs.
4985
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004986- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004987 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004988 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4989 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4990 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4991 previously went unchallenged.
4992
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004993New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004994-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004995
4996Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004997-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004998
4999Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005000-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00005001
5002Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005003----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00005004
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00005005- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
5006 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00005007
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00005008- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
5009 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
5010 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
5011 home.
5012
5013
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005014What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005015===========================
5016
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005017*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
5018
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005019Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005020--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005021
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00005022- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
5023 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00005024
5025 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00005026 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00005027
5028 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
5029 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005030 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00005031 This needs to be documented.
5032
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00005033- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
5034 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
5035
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00005036- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
5037 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
5038 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
5039
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00005040- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
5041 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
5042
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00005043- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
5044 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
5045 class forbids it).
5046
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00005047- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
5048 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
5049 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
5050
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00005051- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
5052
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005053Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005054-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005055
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00005056- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
5057 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005058 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00005059
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00005060- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
5061 (like 1 + '').
5062
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005063Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005064-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005065
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00005066- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
5067 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
5068 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
5069 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005070 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00005071 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
5072
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00005073- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
5074 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
5075 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
5076 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
5077
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00005078- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
5079 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00005080 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
5081 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
5082 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00005083
5084- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
5085 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00005086
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00005087- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
5088 bytes on its input.
5089
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005090Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005091-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005092
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00005093- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00005094 convenience function.
5095
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00005096- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
5097 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
5098 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005099 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
5100 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
5101 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
5102 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
5103 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
5104 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00005105
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00005106- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
5107 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
5108 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
5109 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
5110
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00005111- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
5112 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
5113 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
5114
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00005115- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
5116 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
5117 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
5118 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
5119
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005120- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
5121 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005122 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005123 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
5124 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
5125 new -l and -e options.
5126
5127- statcache is now deprecated.
5128
5129- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
5130 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005131 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005132 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
5133 time properly taken into account.
5134
5135- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
5136 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
5137 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
5138 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
5139
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005140Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005141-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005142
5143Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005144-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005145
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005146- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
5147 is built with libdb3 if available.
5148
5149- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
5150
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005151C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005152-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005153
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00005154- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
5155 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
5156 PySequence_Size().
5157
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005158- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
5159
5160- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
5161 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
5162 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
5163
5164- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
5165 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
5166
5167- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
5168 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
5169
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005170New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005171-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005172
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00005173- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
5174 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
5175
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00005176- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
5177 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
5178
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00005179- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
5180
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005181Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005182-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005183
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00005184- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
5185 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
5186
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005187Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005188-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005189
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005190Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005191----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005192
5193- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
5194 removed completely in the next release.
5195
5196- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
5197 OSX.
5198
5199- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
5200 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
5201
5202- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
5203
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005204
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005205What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005206===========================
5207
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005208*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
5209
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005210Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005211--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005212
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005213- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005214 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005215 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005216 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
5217 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005218 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
5219 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005220 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
5221 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00005222
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00005223- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
5224 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
5225
5226- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
5227 class methods, static methods, and properties.
5228
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005229Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005230-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005231
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00005232- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
5233 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
5234 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
5235 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
5236 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
5237 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
5238 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
5239 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
5240
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005241- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
5242 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
5243 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
5244 example).
5245
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005246- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005247 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005248 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005249 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005250
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005251- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
5252 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
5253 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00005254 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005255
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005256- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
5257 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
5258 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
5259 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
5260 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
5261 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
5262
5263 isinstance(x, (A, B))
5264
5265 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
5266
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005267Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005268-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005269
5270- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
5271
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005272- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
5273
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005274- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
5275 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00005276
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005277- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
5278 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
5279 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
5280 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
5281 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
5282 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00005283 attributes.
5284
5285- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
5286 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
5287 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00005288
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005289- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
5290 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
5291 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005292
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005293- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
5294 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
5295 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005296 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
5297 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
5298
5299- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
5300 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005301
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005302Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005303-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005304
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00005305- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
5306 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
5307
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005308- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
5309 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
5310 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
5311 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
5312
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00005313- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
5314 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
5315 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
5316 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
5317
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00005318 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
5319 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
5320 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
5321 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
5322 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
5323 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
5324 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
5325 without losing information).
5326
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005327- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005328 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
5329 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
5330 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
5331 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
5332 module).
5333
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00005334 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005335 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
5336 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
5337 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
5338 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005339
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005340- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00005341 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
5342 encoding.
5343
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00005344- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
5345 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
5346
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005347- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005348 to allow saving the message body to a file.
5349
5350- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
5351 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
5352 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
5353 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
5354
5355- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
5356
5357- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
5358 ON, and OFF.
5359
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005360- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
5361 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
5362
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005363Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005364-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005365
5366- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
5367 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
5368 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005369
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005370- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
5371 been added: -X and -E.
5372
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005373Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005374-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005375
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005376- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
5377 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
5378
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005379C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005380-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005381
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00005382- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
5383 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
5384 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
5385 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
5386 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
5387
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00005388- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
5389 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
5390 as long) arguments.
5391
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005392- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
5393 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
5394 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
5395 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
5396 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
5397 report any bugs or strange behavior).
5398
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005399- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
5400 input.
5401
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005402New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005403-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005404
5405Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005406-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005407
5408Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005409-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005410
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00005411- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
5412 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
5413 is created for .py and .pyw files.
5414
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005415- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
5416 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
5417 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005418 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005419
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005420 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
5421 # (SIGINT) behavior.
5422 import signal
5423 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005424
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005425 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005426 while 1:
5427 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005428 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005429 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
5430 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
5431 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
5432 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005433
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005434
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005435What's New in Python 2.2a4?
5436===========================
5437
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005438*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
5439
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005440Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005441--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005442
5443- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
5444 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
5445 documentation for all operations on list objects.
5446
5447- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
5448 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
5449 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
5450 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
5451 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
5452 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
5453 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005454
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005455- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005456 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005457 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
5458 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
5459 associate a docstring with a property.
5460
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005461- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
5462 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5463 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5464 other built-in object types.
5465
5466- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5467 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5468 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5469 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5470 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5471
5472- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5473 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5474
5475- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5476 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005477 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005478 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5479 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5480 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5481 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5482 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5483
5484- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5485 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5486 class.
5487
5488- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5489 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5490 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5491 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5492
5493- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5494 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5495 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5496 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5497
5498- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5499 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5500
5501- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5502 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5503 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5504 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5505 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005506 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005507 with the same value as s.
5508
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005509- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5510
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005511Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005512----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005513
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005514- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5515
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005516- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5517 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5518 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5519 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5520 objects.
5521
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005522- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5523 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005524 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5525 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5526
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005527- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5528 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5529 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5530
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005531Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005532-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005533
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005534- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5535 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5536 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5537 by the instances.
5538
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005539- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5540 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5541 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5542
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005543- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5544 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5545 before the entire comparison is complete.
5546
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005547- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5548 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5549 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5550
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005551- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5552 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5553 getwriter().
5554
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005555- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5556 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5557
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005558- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005559 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5560 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5561
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005562- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5563 iterable object.
5564
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005565- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5566 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005567
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005568- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5569 authentication.
5570
5571- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5572 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005573
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005574- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005575 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5576 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5577 a sample driver.)
5578
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005579Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005580-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005581
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005582- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5583 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5584 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5585 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5586 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5587 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5588 kernel has large file support.
5589
5590- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5591 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5592 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5593 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5594 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5595
5596- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5597 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5598 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5599
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005600C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005601-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005602
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005603- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5604 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5605
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005606New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005607-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005608
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005609- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5610 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5611
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005612Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005613-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005614
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005615- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5616 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5617 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5618 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5619 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5620
5621- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5622 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5623 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5624 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5625
5626- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5627 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5628
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005629Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005630-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005631
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005632- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005633 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5634 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005635
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005636
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005637What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5638===========================
5639
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005640*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5641
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005642Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005643----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005644
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005645- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5646 big to represent as a C double.
5647
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005648- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5649 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5650 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5651 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5652 restriction).
5653
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005654- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5655 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5656 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5657 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5658 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5659
5660 >>> dir([])
5661 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5662 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5663 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5664 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5665 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5666 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5667 'reverse', 'sort']
5668
5669 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5670
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005671- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005672 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5673 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5674 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5675 OverflowError exception.
5676
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005677- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005678 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005679 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5680 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5681 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5682 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5683 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005684 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005685 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5686 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5687
5688 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5689 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5690 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5691 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005692
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005693- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005694 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5695 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5696 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5697 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5698 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5699 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5700 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5701 once it is created.
5702
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005703- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5704 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5705 (key, value) pairs.
5706
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005707- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005708 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5709 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5710
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005711- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5712 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5713 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5714 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5715 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005716
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005717- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005718 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5719 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5720
5721 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5722
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005723- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005724 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5725
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005726Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005727-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005728
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005729- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005730 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5731 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005732
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005733- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5734 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5735 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5736 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5737 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5738 in this area anymore).
5739
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005740- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5741 threading.Timer.
5742
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005743- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5744 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5745
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005746- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005747 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5748
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005749- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005750 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5751 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5752 converted to Python longs.
5753
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005754- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005755 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5756
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005757- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5758 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5759 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5760
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005761Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005762-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005763
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005764- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5765 division operators as per PEP 238.
5766
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005767Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005768-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005769
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005770- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5771 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5772 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5773 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5774
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005775C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005776-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005777
5778- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005779
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005780- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5781 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005782 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005783
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005784 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5785 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005786 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005787 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005788
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005789- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005790 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5791 module:
5792
5793 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005794
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005795 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5796 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005797
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005798 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5799 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005800
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005801 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5802
5803 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5804
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005805- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005806 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5807 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5808 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005809
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005810New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005811-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005812
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005813- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5814 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5815 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5816 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5817 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005818
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005819Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005820-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005821
5822Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005823-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005824
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005825- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5826 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5827 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5828 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005829 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5830 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5831 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5832 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5833 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005834
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005835- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005836 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5837
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005838
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005839What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5840===========================
5841
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005842*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5843
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005844Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005845-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005846
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005847- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5848 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5849
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005850- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5851 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5852 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005853
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005854- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5855 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5856 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5857 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005858
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005859- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5860
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005861- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005862
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005863Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005864-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005865
5866- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005867 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005868 the module docstring for details.
5869
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005870Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005871-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005872
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005873- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005874 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5875 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5876 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005877
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005878- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5879 Nick Mathewson.
5880
5881Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005882----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005883
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005884- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5885 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5886 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5887 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5888 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5889 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5890 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5891 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5892
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005893- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5894 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5895 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5896 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5897
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005898- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5899 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5900 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5901 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5902 come a long way).
5903
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005904- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5905 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5906 write filters for these warnings).
5907
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005908- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5909 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5910 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5911 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5912 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5913
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005914- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5915 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5916 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5917 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5918 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5919 older distribution.
5920
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005921Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005922-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005923
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005924- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5925 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005926 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005927
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005928- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5929 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5930 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5931
5932- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5933
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005934- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5935
5936- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5937
5938- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5939
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005940- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005941
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005942- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5943
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005944New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005945-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005946
5947C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005948-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005949
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005950- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5951 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5952 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5953 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5954 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5955 against buffer overruns.
5956
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005957- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005958 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5959 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005960 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5961 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5962 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5963
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005964- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5965 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5966 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5967 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5968 deprecated.
5969
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005970Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005971-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005972
5973- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5974 relevant is found.
5975
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005976
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005977What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005978===========================
5979
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005980*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5981
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005982Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005983----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005984
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005985- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5986 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5987 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5988 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5989 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5990 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5991 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5992 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005993 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005994 repaired.
5995
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005996- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005997 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005998 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5999 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
6000 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
6001 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
6002 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
6003 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
6004 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
6005 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
6006
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00006007- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
6008 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
6009 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
6010 leading BMO character).
6011
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00006012- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
6013 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
6014 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
6015
6016 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
6017 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
6018 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00006019
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00006020 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
6021 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
6022 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
6023 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
6024 for various simple to use conversions.
6025
6026 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
6027 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
6028
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006029 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
6030 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
6031 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
6032 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
6033 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
6034 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
6035 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
6036 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
6037 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
6038 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
6039 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
6040 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
6041 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
6042 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
6043 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00006044
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00006045- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
6046 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
6047 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00006048 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00006049 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00006050
6051 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00006052 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
6053 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
6054 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
6055 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
6056 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006057 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
6058 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00006059
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006060 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
6061 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
6062 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00006063 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00006064
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00006065- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
6066 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
6067 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
6068 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
6069 floating arithmetic,
6070
6071 x = 9007199254740992.0
6072 print long(x)
6073
6074 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
6075 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
6076 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
6077 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
6078 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
6079 functions are of good quality).
6080
6081 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
6082 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
6083 algorithms to break.
6084
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00006085- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
6086 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
6087 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
6088 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
6089 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
6090 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
6091 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
6092 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
6093 order.
6094
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00006095- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
6096 operation along the most common code paths.
6097
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00006098- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
6099 the same as dict.has_key(x).
6100
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00006101- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
6102 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
6103 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
6104 {}.update(UserDict())
6105
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00006106- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
6107 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
6108 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
6109 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
6110 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
6111 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
6112 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
6113 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
6114
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00006115- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00006116 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006117
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00006118 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00006119 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
6120 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00006121 join() method of strings
6122 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00006123 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
6124 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006125 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00006126 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00006127
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00006128- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
6129 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
6130
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00006131- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
6132 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
6133
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00006134- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
6135 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
6136 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
6137 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
6138
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00006139- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
6140 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00006141 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00006142 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
6143 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00006144
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00006145- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
6146
6147
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006148Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006149-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006150
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00006151- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006152 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00006153 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
6154 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
6155
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00006156- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
6157 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
6158
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00006159- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
6160 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
6161 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
6162 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
6163
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00006164- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
6165 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
6166 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
6167
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00006168- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
6169
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00006170- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
6171
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00006172- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
6173 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
6174 that are still imported into string.py).
6175
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006176- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
6177
6178- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
6179 Now it does.
6180
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00006181- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
6182
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00006183- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
6184 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
6185 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
6186 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
6187 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00006188 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
6189 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00006190
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00006191- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
6192 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
6193 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
6194 'help(object)'.
6195
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006196Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006197-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006198
6199- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006200 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006201 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
6202 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
6203
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006204- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00006205 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
6206 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006207
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00006208C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006209-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00006210
6211- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
6212 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006213
6214----
6215
6216**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**