blob: e5224ef33b2a3bf4fb751afeedbc67df182d1f28 [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2006*
11
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000012Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Neal Norwitzc10978f2005-12-19 06:07:16 +000015- Bug #1072182, fix some potential problems if characters are signed.
16
Neal Norwitz5d0ad502005-12-19 04:27:42 +000017- Bug #889500, fix line number on SyntaxWarning for global declarations.
18
Neal Norwitzdb83eb32005-12-18 05:29:30 +000019- Bug #1378022, UTF-8 files with a leading BOM crashed the interpreter.
20
Neal Norwitze7214a12005-12-18 05:03:17 +000021- Support for converting hex strings to floats no longer works.
22 This was not portable. float('0x3') now raises a ValueError.
23
Barry Warsaw2a38a862005-12-18 01:27:35 +000024- Patch #1382163: Expose Subversion revision number to Python. New C API
25 function Py_GetBuildNumber(). New attribute sys.build_number. Build number
26 is now displayed in interactive prompt banner.
27
Georg Brandlfa166682005-12-17 21:45:17 +000028- Implementation of PEP 341 - Unification of try/except and try/finally.
29 "except" clauses can now be written together with a "finally" clause in
Neal Norwitz11ca77e2005-12-17 22:24:12 +000030 one try statement instead of two nested ones. Patch #1355913.
Georg Brandlfa166682005-12-17 21:45:17 +000031
Hye-Shik Chang835b2432005-12-17 04:38:31 +000032- Bug #1379994: Builtin unicode_escape and raw_unicode_escape codec
33 now encodes backslash correctly.
34
Martin v. Löwisb45b3152005-11-28 17:34:23 +000035- Patch #1350409: Work around signal handling bug in Visual Studio 2005.
36
Georg Brandlf06e30a2005-11-24 15:37:42 +000037- Bug #1281408: Py_BuildValue now works correct even with unsigned longs
38 and long longs.
39
Neal Norwitz67715f02005-11-09 06:59:35 +000040- SF Bug #1350188, "setdlopenflags" leads to crash upon "import"
41 It was possible dlerror() returns a NULL pointer, use a default error
42 message in this case.
43
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +000044- Replaced most Unicode charmap codecs with new ones using the
45 new Unicode translate string feature in the builtin charmap
46 codec; the codecs were created from the mapping tables available
47 at ftp.unicode.org and contain a few updates (e.g. the Mac OS
48 encodings now include a mapping for the Apple logo)
49
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +000050- Added a few more codecs for Mac OS encodings
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +000051
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +000052- Speed up some Unicode operations.
53
54- A new AST parser implementation was completed.
55
Neal Norwitzb6570f52005-10-21 06:26:10 +000056- SF bug #1167751: fix incorrect code being for generator expressions.
Neal Norwitz16af7342005-10-21 06:25:33 +000057 The following code now raises a SyntaxError: foo(a = i for i in range(10))
58
Neal Norwitz708e51a2005-10-03 04:48:15 +000059- SF Bug #976608: fix SystemError when mtime of an imported file is -1.
60
Neal Norwitz11bd1192005-10-03 00:54:56 +000061- SF Bug #887946: fix segfault when redirecting stdin from a directory.
62 Provide a warning when a directory is passed on the command line.
63
Neal Norwitz40d37812005-10-02 01:48:49 +000064- Fix segfault with invalid coding.
65
66- SF bug #772896: unknown encoding results in MemoryError.
67
Raymond Hettinger6b27cda2005-09-24 21:23:05 +000068- All iterators now have a Boolean value of true. Formerly, some iterators
69 supported a __len__() method which evaluated to False when the iterator
70 was empty.
71
Guido van Rossum630db602005-09-20 18:49:54 +000072- On 64-bit platforms, when __len__() returns a value that cannot be
73 represented as a C int, raise OverflowError.
74
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000075- test__locale is skipped on OS X < 10.4 (only partial locale support is
Walter Dörwald6611a8b2005-10-09 19:28:35 +000076 present).
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000077
Georg Brandl80bbf3f2005-09-14 19:38:29 +000078- SF bug #893549: parsing keyword arguments was broken with a few format
79 codes.
80
Guido van Rossum8ee3e5a2005-09-14 18:09:42 +000081- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on AIX 5.3
82 with IBM's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1284289). This also closes SF
83 bug #105470: test_pwd fails on 64bit system (Opteron).
84
Guido van Rossum539c6622005-09-14 17:49:54 +000085- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on HP-UX 11 on
86 Itanium2 with HP's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1225212).
87
Georg Brandl4550b8d2005-08-26 06:43:52 +000088- Disallow keyword arguments for type constructors that don't use them
Georg Brandl02c42872005-08-26 06:42:30 +000089 (fixes bug #1119418).
90
Martin v. Löwisd35edda2005-08-24 08:39:24 +000091- Forward UnicodeDecodeError into SyntaxError for source encoding errors.
92
Barry Warsawe2eca0b2005-08-15 18:14:19 +000093- SF bug #900092: When tracing (e.g. for hotshot), restore 'return' events for
94 exceptions that cause a function to exit.
95
Raymond Hettinger9f1a6792005-07-31 01:16:36 +000096- The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
97 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
98 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
99
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +0000100- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
101
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +0000102- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
103 reference counts in some error exit cases.
104
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000105- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
106 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
107 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
108 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
109 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
110 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
111 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
112 realloc.
113
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +0000114- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
115 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
116
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +0000117- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
118 like their int counterparts.
119
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +0000120- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
121 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
122 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
123 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
124 for a longer write-up of the problem).
125
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +0000126- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
127 serializing floats.
128
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +0000129- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
130 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
131 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
132
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +0000133- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
134 278.
135
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000136- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
137 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
138 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
139 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000140 to the base class has been moved to the proper nb_* magic slot and out of
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000141 PyNumber_*().
142 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
143
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +0000144- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
145 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
146 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
147 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
148
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +0000149- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
150 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
151 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
152 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
153 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
154
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +0000155- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
156 disabled caused a crash.
157
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000158- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
159 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
160
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000161- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +0000162 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
163
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +0000164- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
165
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000166- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +0000167 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
168 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
169 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000170
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +0000171- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
172
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +0000173- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
174 returning None.
175
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000176- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +0000177 ('\') with a specific error message.
178
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +0000179- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
180
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +0000181- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
182 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
183
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000184- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000185 an ferror() call.
186
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000187- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
188 list.sort().
189
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000190- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
191 (2+3) --> (5).
192
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000193- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
194
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000195- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
196 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000197
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000198- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
199 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
200 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
201
Neil Schemenauercf52c072005-08-12 17:34:58 +0000202- Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a
203 unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and
204 calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance.
205
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000206Extension Modules
207-----------------
208
Neal Norwitz8856fb72005-12-18 03:34:22 +0000209- Patch #1365916: fix some unsafe 64-bit mmap methods.
210
Hye-Shik Changc5c57e62005-12-12 11:48:32 +0000211- Bug #1290333: Added a workaround for cjkcodecs' _codecs_cn build
212 problem on AIX.
213
Georg Brandla13c2442005-11-22 19:30:31 +0000214- Bug #869197: os.setgroups rejects long integer arguments
215
Neal Norwitz0f46bbf2005-11-03 05:00:25 +0000216- Bug #1346533, select.poll() doesn't raise an error if timeout > sys.maxint
217
Neal Norwitz7b631792005-11-02 05:26:07 +0000218- Bug #1344508, Fix UNIX mmap leaking file descriptors
219
Neal Norwitzf3396542005-10-28 05:52:22 +0000220- Patch #1338314, Bug #1336623: fix tarfile so it can extract
221 REGTYPE directories from tarfiles written by old programs.
222
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +0000223- Get bsddb module to build with BSD DB version 3.2
224
Neal Norwitz484d9a42005-09-30 04:46:49 +0000225- Patch #1309009, Fix segfault in pyexpat when the XML document is in latin_1,
226 but Python incorrectly assumes it is in UTF-8 format
227
Georg Brandle677adc2005-09-29 13:40:49 +0000228- Fix parse errors in the readline module when compiling without threads.
229
Hye-Shik Chang9ceebd52005-09-24 14:58:47 +0000230- Patch #1288833: Removed thread lock from socket.getaddrinfo on
231 FreeBSD 5.3 and later versions which got thread-safe getaddrinfo(3).
232
Michael W. Hudson10402a32005-09-22 09:19:01 +0000233- Patches #1298449 and #1298499: Add some missing checks for error
234 returns in cStringIO.c.
235
Neal Norwitz058bde12005-09-21 06:44:25 +0000236- Patch #1297028: fix segfault if call type on MultibyteCodec,
237 MultibyteStreamReader, or MultibyteStreamWriter
238
Neal Norwitzcfe7dd92005-09-19 06:49:27 +0000239- Fix memory leak in posix.access().
240
Martin v. Löwis8b291e22005-09-18 08:17:56 +0000241- Patch #1213831: Fix typo in unicodedata._getcode.
242
Georg Brandlfb1ef852005-09-14 20:53:32 +0000243- Bug #1007046: os.startfile() did not accept unicode strings encoded in
244 the file system encoding.
245
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000246- Patch #756021: Special-case socket.inet_aton('255.255.255.255') for
247 platforms that don't have inet_aton().
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000248
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000249- Bug #1215928: Fix bz2.BZ2File.seek() for 64-bit file offsets.
250
251- Bug #1191043: Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines for files containing one
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000252 line without newlines.
253
Georg Brandl38387b82005-08-24 07:17:40 +0000254- Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did
255 on Windows.
256
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000257- Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
Martin v. Löwisebd9d5b2005-08-09 15:00:59 +0000258 st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
259
Michael W. Hudson8137bea2005-07-27 20:24:40 +0000260- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
261 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
262 for large or negative values.
263
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000264- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000265 implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false.
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000266
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000267- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
268
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000269- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
270 if available on the platform.
271
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000272- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
273 available on the platform.
274
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000275- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
276 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
277
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000278- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
279
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000280- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
281 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
282 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
283
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000284- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
285
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000286- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
287 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
288
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000289- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000290 file size.
291
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000292- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
293
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000294- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
295 {remove_history,replace_history}
296
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000297- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
298 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000299
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000300- stat_float_times is now True.
301
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000302- array.array objects are now picklable.
303
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000304- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
305 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
306
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000307- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
308 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
309 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
310
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000311- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
312 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000313
314Library
315-------
316
Neal Norwitzab86f8e2005-12-23 21:44:36 +0000317- Patch #1157027: cookielib mishandles RFC 2109 cookies in Netscape mode
318
Neal Norwitz338e7862005-12-23 21:27:46 +0000319- Patch #1117398: cookielib.LWPCookieJar and .MozillaCookieJar now raise
320 LoadError as documented, instead of IOError. For compatibility,
321 LoadError subclasses IOError.
322
Brett Cannon3cbd0382005-12-16 22:49:23 +0000323- Added the hashlib module. It provides secure hash functions for MD5 and
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000324 SHA1, 224, 256, 384, and 512. Note that recent developments make the
325 historic MD5 and SHA1 unsuitable for cryptographic-strength applications.
326 In <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-December/058850.html>
327 Ronald L. Rivest offered this advice for Python:
328
329 "The consensus of researchers in this area (at least as
330 expressed at the NIST Hash Function Workshop 10/31/05),
331 is that SHA-256 is a good choice for the time being, but
332 that research should continue, and other alternatives may
333 arise from this research. The larger SHA's also seem OK."
Brett Cannon3cbd0382005-12-16 22:49:23 +0000334
Fredrik Lundh7e0aef02005-12-12 18:54:55 +0000335- Added a subset of Fredrik Lundh's ElementTree package. Available
336 modules are xml.etree.ElementTree, xml.etree.ElementPath, and
337 xml.etree.ElementInclude, from ElementTree 1.2.6.
338
Martin v. Löwis307021f2005-11-27 16:59:04 +0000339- Patch #1162825: Support non-ASCII characters in IDLE window titles.
340
Georg Brandl1f663572005-11-26 16:50:44 +0000341- Bug #1365984: urllib now opens "data:" URLs again.
342
Brett Cannonad07ff22005-11-23 02:15:50 +0000343- Patch #1314396: prevent deadlock for threading.Thread.join() when an exception
344 is raised within the method itself on a previous call (e.g., passing in an
345 illegal argument)
346
Brett Cannon5d0bf942005-11-02 23:04:26 +0000347- Bug #1340337: change time.strptime() to always return ValueError when there
348 is an error in the format string.
349
Georg Brandle8f24432005-10-03 14:16:44 +0000350- Patch #754022: Greatly enhanced webbrowser.py (by Oleg Broytmann).
351
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000352- Bug #729103: pydoc.py: Fix docother() method to accept additional
Georg Brandl8b813db2005-10-01 16:32:31 +0000353 "parent" argument.
354
Georg Brandlaa935172005-09-29 20:49:16 +0000355- Patch #1300515: xdrlib.py: Fix pack_fstring() to really use null bytes
356 for padding.
357
Georg Brandl80ba8e82005-09-29 20:16:07 +0000358- Bug #1296004: httplib.py: Limit maximal amount of data read from the
359 socket to avoid a MemoryError on Windows.
360
Matthias Klosef3f231f2005-09-20 07:02:49 +0000361- Patch #1166948: locale.py: Prefer LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE and LANG over LANGUAGE
362 to get the correct encoding.
363
364- Patch #1166938: locale.py: Parse LANGUAGE as a colon separated list of
365 languages.
366
Martin v. Löwis4ed67382005-09-18 08:34:39 +0000367- Patch #1268314: Cache lines in StreamReader.readlines for performance.
368
Brett Cannona783d062005-09-15 02:34:56 +0000369- Bug #1290505: Fix clearing the regex cache for time.strptime().
370
Martin v. Löwis5dbdc592005-08-27 10:07:56 +0000371- Bug #1167128: Fix size of a symlink in a tarfile to be 0.
372
Georg Brandl5a650a22005-08-26 08:51:34 +0000373- Patch #810023: Fix off-by-one bug in urllib.urlretrieve reporthook
374 functionality.
375
Martin v. Löwis8b595142005-08-25 11:03:38 +0000376- Bug #1163178: Make IDNA return an empty string when the input is empty.
377
Georg Brandl532efab2005-08-24 22:34:21 +0000378- Patch #848017: Make Cookie more RFC-compliant. Use CRLF as default output
379 separator and do not output trailing semicola.
380
Georg Brandlb9256022005-08-24 18:46:39 +0000381- Patch #1062060: urllib.urlretrieve() now raises a new exception, named
382 ContentTooShortException, when the actually downloaded size does not
383 match the Content-Length header.
384
Martin v. Löwis0a5d4a22005-08-24 14:55:22 +0000385- Bug #1121494: distutils.dir_utils.mkpath now accepts Unicode strings.
386
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000387- Bug #1178484: Return complete lines from codec stream readers
388 even if there is an exception in later lines, resulting in
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000389 correct line numbers for decoding errors in source code.
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000390
Georg Brandl6d2b3462005-08-24 07:36:17 +0000391- Bug #1192315: Disallow negative arguments to clear() in pdb.
392
Martin v. Löwisb813c532005-08-07 20:51:04 +0000393- Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
394
Georg Brandl649f8e72005-08-03 07:30:12 +0000395- Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
396 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
397
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000398- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
399 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
400 Tkdnd.
401
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000402- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
403 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
404
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000405- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
406 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
407
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000408- textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000409 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
410
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000411- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
412 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
413
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000414- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
415 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
416
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000417- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000418 it can be missing in embedded interpreters
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000419
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000420- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
421
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000422- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
423 error messages.
424
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000425- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
426
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000427- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
428 Bug #1224621.
429
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000430- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
431 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
432 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
433 terminates by raising StopIteration.
434
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000435- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
436
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000437- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
438 component of the path.
439
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000440- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
441 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
442 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
443 class at all.
444
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000445- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
446 files to PyPI.
447
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000448- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
449 them to PyPI.
450
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000451- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
452 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
453 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
454 work as expected.
455
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000456- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
457 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
458
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000459- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000460 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
461
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000462- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
463
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000464- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
465 to build.
466
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000467- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
468 symbolic links on Windows.
469
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000470- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000471 profile.py if available.
472
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000473- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
474
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000475- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
476 in LWPCookieJar.
477
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000478- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
479
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000480- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
481
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000482- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
483
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000484- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
485
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000486- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
487
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000488- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
489
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000490- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
491
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000492- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
493
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000494- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
495 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
496 be exploited in various ways.
497
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000498- Bug #1222790: in SimpleXMLRPCServer, set the reuse-address and close-on-exec
Andrew M. Kuchling3a976052005-12-04 15:07:41 +0000499 flags on the HTTP listening socket.
500
Andrew M. Kuchlinge63fde72005-12-04 15:36:57 +0000501- Bug #792570: SimpleXMLRPCServer had problems if the request grew too large.
502 Fixed by reading the HTTP body in chunks instead of one big socket.read().
503
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000504- Patches #893642, #1039083: add allow_none, encoding arguments to constructors of
Andrew M. Kuchling10a16de2005-12-04 16:34:40 +0000505 SimpleXMLRPCServer and CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler.
506
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000507- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
508
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000509- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
510
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000511- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
512
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000513- Enhancements to the csv module:
514
515 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000516 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000517 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000518 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
519 reporting.
520 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
521 dictates.
522 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000523 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000524 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000525 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
526 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000527 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
528 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000529 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000530 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
531 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
532 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
533 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
534 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
535 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
536 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
537 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
538 without first creating a dialect class.
539 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
540 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
541 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000542 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000543 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
544 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000545 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
546 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
547 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
548 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000549 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
550 This has been fixed.
551
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000552- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
553 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
554 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
555 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
556
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000557- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
558
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000559- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
560 (Bug #951915).
561
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000562- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
563 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
564 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000565 encoding alias table.
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000566
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000567- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
568
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000569- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
570 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
571
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000572- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
573
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000574- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
575
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000576- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
577
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000578- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
579
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000580- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
581
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000582- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
583 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
584 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
585
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000586- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000587 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000588
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000589- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
590 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
591 tokenizer with very long source lines.
592
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000593- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
594 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
595
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000596- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
597 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000598
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000599- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
600 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
601
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000602- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
603 correctly.
604
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000605- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
606 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
607 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
608 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
609 between two lines.
610
Walter Dörwalda47d1c02005-08-30 10:23:14 +0000611- Bug #1251300: On UCS-4 builds the "unicode-internal" codec will now complain
612 about illegal code points. The codec now supports PEP 293 style error
613 handlers.
614
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000615- Bug #1235646: ``codecs.StreamRecoder.next()`` now reencodes the data it reads
Walter Dörwaldc5238b82005-09-01 11:56:53 +0000616 from the input stream, so that the output is a byte string in the correct
617 encoding instead of a unicode string.
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000618
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000619- Bug #1202493: Fixing SRE parser to handle '{}' as perl does, rather than
620 considering it exactly like a '*'.
621
Walter Dörwald007f8df2005-10-09 19:42:27 +0000622- Bug #1245379: Add "unicode-1-1-utf-7" as an alias for "utf-7" to
623 ``encodings.aliases``.
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000624
Walter Dörwald09f0dd52005-11-21 19:10:07 +0000625- ` uu.encode()`` and ``uu.decode()`` now support unicode filenames.
626
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000627Build
628-----
629
Martin v. Löwis147fbe52005-08-07 21:09:30 +0000630- Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
631 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
632
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000633- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
634 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
635
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000636- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
637 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
638 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000639 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000640
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000641- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
642 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
643 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
644
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000645- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
646
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000647- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
648 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
649
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000650- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
651 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
652 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
653 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
654 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
655 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
656 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
657 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
658
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000659- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
660 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
661 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
662 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
663
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000664
665C API
666-----
667
Raymond Hettingerbeb31012005-08-16 03:47:52 +0000668- Added a C API for set and frozenset objects.
669
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000670- Removed PyRange_New().
671
Walter Dörwaldd1c1e102005-10-06 20:29:57 +0000672- Patch #1313939: PyUnicode_DecodeCharmap() accepts a unicode string as the
673 mapping argument now. This string is used as a mapping table. Byte values
674 greater than the length of the string and 0xFFFE are treated as undefined
675 mappings.
676
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000677
678Tests
679-----
680
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000681- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000682
Hye-Shik Changaaa2f1d2005-12-10 17:44:27 +0000683- Patch #1276356: New resource "urlfetch" is implemented. This enables
684 even impatient people to run tests that require remote files.
685
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000686
687Documentation
688-------------
689
Georg Brandl32252422005-09-14 20:42:00 +0000690- Bug #1274828: Document os.path.splitunc().
691
Georg Brandl79c122f2005-08-24 07:31:33 +0000692- Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py.
693
Georg Brandl6f2bbd32005-08-24 07:26:55 +0000694- Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation.
695
Georg Brandlf13c4ba2005-08-02 10:28:08 +0000696- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
697
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000698- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
699
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000700- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
701
702- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
703
704- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
705
706- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
707
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000708- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
709 Closes bug #1166582.
710
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000711- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
712 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
713 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
714
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000715Mac
716---
717
718
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000719New platforms
720-------------
721
722- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
723
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000724
725Tools/Demos
726-----------
727
Georg Brandl56897312005-08-24 18:32:30 +0000728- Added two new files to Tools/scripts: pysource.py, which recursively
729 finds Python source files, and findnocoding.py, which finds Python
730 source files that need an encoding declaration.
731 Patch #784089, credits to Oleg Broytmann.
732
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000733- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
734
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000735- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000736
737
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000738What's New in Python 2.4 final?
739===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000740
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000741*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000742
743Core and builtins
744-----------------
745
746- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
747 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
748 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
749
750
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000751What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
752==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000753
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000754*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000755
756Core and builtins
757-----------------
758
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000759- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
760 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
761 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
762
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000763
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000764Library
765-------
766
767- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
768 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
769 raised is re-raised.
770
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000771- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
772 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
773
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000774- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
775 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
776 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
777 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
778 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
779 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
780 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
781 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
782 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
783 by the slice are recomputed now.
784
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000785- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000786
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000787Build
788-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000789
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000790- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
791 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
792 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000793
794C API
795-----
796
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000797- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
798
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000799
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000800What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
801================================
802
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000803*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000804
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000805License
806-------
807
808The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
809is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
810changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
811Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
812intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
813durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
814the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
815License::
816
817 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
818
819says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
820to Python 2.1.1.
821
822The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
823License Version 2.
824
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000825Core and builtins
826-----------------
827
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000828- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
829 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
830 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
831 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
832 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
833 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
834 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
Andrew M. Kuchlingb2a739d2005-11-22 15:14:44 +0000835 ``AttributeError`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000836 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
837 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
838
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000839- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000840
841Extension Modules
842-----------------
843
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000844- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
845 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
846 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
847 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000848
849Library
850-------
851
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000852- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
853 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
854 returned.
855
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000856- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
857
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000858- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
859 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
860
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000861- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
862
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000863- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
864 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000865
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000866- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
867
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000868- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
869
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000870- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000871 the source code is updated and reloaded.
872
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000873Build
874-----
875
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000876- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000877
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000878What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
879================================
880
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000881*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000882
883Core and builtins
884-----------------
885
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000886- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000887 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
888
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000889- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
890 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
891 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
892 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
893
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000894- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
895 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
896
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000897- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
898 constant.
899
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000900- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
901 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
902 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
903 large), and to anomalies such as
904 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
905 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
906 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
907 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000908
909Extension modules
910-----------------
911
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000912- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
913 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000914 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
915 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
916 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000917
918Library
919-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000920
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000921- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000922 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000923 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
924 --swig-cpp.
925
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000926- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
927 it is set.
928
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000929- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000930
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000931- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
932 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
933 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
934 Closes bug #1039270.
935
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000936- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000937
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000938 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000939 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
940 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
941 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
942 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
943 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
944 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
945 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
946 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
947 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
948 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
949 + Updates to documentation.
950
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000951- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
952 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
953 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
954 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
955
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000956- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000957
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000958- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
959 applications should use the getmember function.
960
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000961- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
962
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000963- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
964 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
965 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
966 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
967 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
968 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
969 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
970 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
971 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
972
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000973- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
974 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000975 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000976
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000977- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
978 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
979 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
980 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
981 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
982 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
983 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
984 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000985
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000986- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
987 the new public features (of which there are many).
988
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000989- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000990 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
991 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
992 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
993 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000994 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000995
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000996- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
997
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000998- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
999 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
1000 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
1001 options.
1002
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +00001003- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
1004 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
1005 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
1006 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
1007 conditions under which non-string values work.
1008
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001009Build
1010-----
1011
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +00001012- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
1013 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
1014 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
1015
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +00001016- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
1017 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
1018 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
1019 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
1020 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001021
1022C API
1023-----
1024
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +00001025- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
1026 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
1027
1028- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
1029
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +00001030- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
1031 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
1032 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
1033 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
1034 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
1035 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
1036 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
1037 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
1038 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
1039
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +00001040- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
1041
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +00001042- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
1043 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
1044 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001045
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001046Tests
1047-----
1048
1049- test__locale ported to unittest
1050
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001051Mac
1052---
1053
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +00001054- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
1055 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
1056 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001057
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001058Tools/Demos
1059-----------
1060
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +00001061- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
1062 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
1063 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
1064 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
1065 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001066
1067
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001068What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
1069=================================
1070
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +00001071*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001072
1073Core and builtins
1074-----------------
1075
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001076- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001077 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
1078
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001079- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
1080 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
1081 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
1082 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
1083 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
1084 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
1085 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
1086 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001087 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
1088 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
1089 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
1090 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
1091 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001092
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +00001093- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
1094 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
1095 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
1096 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
1097 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
1098
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +00001099- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
1100
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +00001101- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
1102 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
1103
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +00001104- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
1105 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
1106 modified the list.
1107
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +00001108- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
1109 functions is now writable.
1110
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +00001111- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
1112 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
1113 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
1114 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
1115
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001116- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
1117 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
1118 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
1119 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
1120 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +00001121
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +00001122- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
1123 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
1124
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001125Extension modules
1126-----------------
1127
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001128- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
1129
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +00001130- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
1131 data.
1132
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001133- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
1134 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
1135 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
1136 supposed to have been truncated away.
1137
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +00001138- Added socket.socketpair().
1139
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +00001140- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
1141 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
1142
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001143- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +00001144 versions of Python, have now been removed.
1145
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001146Library
1147-------
1148
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001149- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001150 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001151
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +00001152- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
1153 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
1154
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +00001155- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
1156 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
1157
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001158- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
1159
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +00001160- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
1161 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +00001162
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +00001163- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
1164 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
1165
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +00001166- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
1167
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +00001168- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
1169
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +00001170- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
1171
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +00001172- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
1173 Percivall.
1174
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +00001175- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
1176 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
1177
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001178- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
1179 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
1180 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001181 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001182
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001183- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
1184 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
1185 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
1186 and exponent.
1187
1188- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
1189
1190- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +00001191 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001192 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
1193
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001194- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
1195 to the readline module.
1196
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001197- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001198 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
1199 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001200
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +00001201- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
1202 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
1203 contains symlinks.
1204
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +00001205- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
1206 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
1207
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +00001208- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
1209 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
1210 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1211
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001212- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
1213 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
1214 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
1215 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
1216 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
1217 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
1218 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
1219 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
1220 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
1221 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
1222 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
1223 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
1224 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
1225
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +00001226- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
1227
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001228Tools/Demos
1229-----------
1230
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001231- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
1232 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
1233
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +00001234- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
1235
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001236Build
1237-----
1238
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001239- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
1240 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
1241 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
1242 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
1243 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
1244 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
1245 plans to do so.
1246
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +00001247- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
1248 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
1249
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +00001250- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
1251 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
1252
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001253- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
1254 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
1255
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +00001256- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
1257 GNU/k*BSD systems.
1258
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +00001259- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
1260 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
1261
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001262C API
1263-----
1264
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001265..
1266
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001267Documentation
1268-------------
1269
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001270- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1271 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1272
1273- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1274 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1275 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001276
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001277New platforms
1278-------------
1279
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001280- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1281
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001282Tests
1283-----
1284
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001285..
1286
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001287Windows
1288-------
1289
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001290- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1291 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1292 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1293 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1294 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1295 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1296 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1297 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1298 the problem.
1299
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001300Mac
1301---
1302
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001303..
1304
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001305
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001306What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1307=================================
1308
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001309*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001310
1311Core and builtins
1312-----------------
1313
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001314- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1315 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1316 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1317 sensitive code.
1318
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001319- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001320 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001321
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001322 @staticmethod
1323 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001324
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001325 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001326
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001327- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1328 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1329 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1330 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1331 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1332 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1333 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1334 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1335 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1336 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1337 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1338
1339 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1340 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1341 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1342 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1343 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1344 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1345 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1346
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001347- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1348 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1349
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001350- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001351 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001352
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001353- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001354 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001355 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1356
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001357- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001358 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1359 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1360
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001361- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1362 types that support garbage collection.
1363
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001364- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1365
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001366- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1367 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1368 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1369 Jython.
1370
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001371- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1372
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001373- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1374 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1375
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001376- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1377 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1378 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001379
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001380- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1381 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1382 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1383
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001384Extension modules
1385-----------------
1386
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001387- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1388
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001389Library
1390-------
1391
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001392- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1393 TIS-620
1394
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001395- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1396 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1397 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1398 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1399 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1400 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1401 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1402 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1403 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1404 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1405
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001406- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1407
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001408- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1409 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1410 same as when the argument is omitted).
1411 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1412
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001413- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1414
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001415- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1416 schemes are offered.
1417
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001418- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1419
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001420- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1421 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1422 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1423
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001424- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1425
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001426- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1427 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1428
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001429- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1430 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1431 when dummy_threading is being used.
1432
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001433- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1434 from a tarfile.
1435
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001436- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001437 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001438
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001439- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1440 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1441 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1442 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1443
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001444- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1445 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1446
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001447- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1448 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1449 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1450 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1451 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1452 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1453 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1454 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1455 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1456 by some other method in progress).
1457
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001458- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1459 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1460 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001461
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001462- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1463
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001464- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1465 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1466 AM Kuchling.
1467
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001468- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1469 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1470 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1471
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001472- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1473 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1474 instead of unsigned.
1475
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001476- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001477 no longer part of the public API.
1478
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001479- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1480 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1481 string methods of the same name).
1482
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001483- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001484 SF patch 945642.
1485
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001486- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1487
1488 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1489
1490 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1491 DocTestSuites.
1492
1493- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1494 that provide thread-local data.
1495
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001496- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1497 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1498
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001499- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1500
1501- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1502 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1503 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1504
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001505- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1506
1507 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1508 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1509 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001510
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001511 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1512 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1513 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1514 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1515
1516 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1517 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1518
1519 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1520 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1521 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1522 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1523
1524 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1525 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1526 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1527 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1528 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1529
1530 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1531 wrapping help output.
1532
1533 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1534 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1535 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001536
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001537C API
1538-----
1539
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001540- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1541 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1542 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1543 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1544 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1545 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1546 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1547 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1548 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1549 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1550 its visible semantics have not changed.
1551
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001552- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1553 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1554
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001555Documentation
1556-------------
1557
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001558- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001559
1560 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001561 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001562
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001563 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001564
1565 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1566
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001567- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001568
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001569Tests
1570-----
1571
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001572- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001573 platforms that use the Makefile.
1574
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001575- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1576 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1577 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1578
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001579
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001580What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1581=================================
1582
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001583*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001584
1585Core and builtins
1586-----------------
1587
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001588- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1589 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1590 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1591 objects now (one object instead of three).
1592
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001593- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1594 Windows DLLs.
1595
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001596- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1597 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001598
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001599- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1600 a new .pyc magic.
1601
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001602- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1603 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1604 be there.
1605
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001606- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1607 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1608 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1609
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001610- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1611 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1612 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1613
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001614- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1615
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001616- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1617 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1618 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001619
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001620- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1621 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1622
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001623- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1624
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001625- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001626 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001627
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001628- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1629
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001630- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1631
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001632- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1633 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1634
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001635- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1636 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1637 Fixes bug #858016 .
1638
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001639- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1640 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1641 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1642
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001643- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1644 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1645 improves their performance (about 35%).
1646
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001647- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1648 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1649 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1650
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001651- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1652 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1653 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1654 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1655
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001656- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1657 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001658 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001659 length is not known).
1660
1661- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1662 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001663 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1664 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001665 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1666
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001667- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1668 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1669
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001670- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1671 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1672 keyword arguments.
1673
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001674- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1675 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1676 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1677
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001678- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1679 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1680 cases.
1681
1682- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1683 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1684 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1685 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1686 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1687 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1688 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1689 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1690 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1691 a release build.
1692
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001693- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1694 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1695
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001696- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001697 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001698
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001699- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1700 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1701 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1702 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1703 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1704 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1705 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1706 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1707 destroyed.
1708
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001709- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1710 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1711 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1712 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1713 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1714 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1715 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1716 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1717
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001718- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1719 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1720 character other than a space.
1721
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001722- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1723 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1724 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1725 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1726 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1727 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1728 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1729 attributes with the same name.
1730
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001731- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1732 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1733 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1734 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1735 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1736 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1737 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1738 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1739 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1740 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1741 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1742 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1743 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1744 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001745
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001746- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1747 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1748 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1749 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1750 This has been repaired.
1751
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001752- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1753
1754- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1755
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001756- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1757 over a sequence.
1758
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001759- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001760 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001761
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001762- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1763
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001764- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1765 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1766 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1767 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1768 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1769 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1770 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1771 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1772
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001773- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1774 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1775 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1776
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001777- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1778 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1779 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1780 freelist.
1781
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001782- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1783 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1784
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001785- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1786 number.
1787
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001788- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1789 a TypeError exception.
1790
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001791- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1792 820195.
1793
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001794- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1795 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1796 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1797
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001798- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001799 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1800 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001801
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001802- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1803 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1804 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1805
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001806- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1807 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001808 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001809
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001810- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001811 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1812 the first call.
1813
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001814
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001815Extension modules
1816-----------------
1817
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001818- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1819 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1820
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001821- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1822 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1823 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1824 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1825 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1826 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1827 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001828
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001829- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1830
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001831- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1832
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001833- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1834 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1835
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001836- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1837 fewer false positives.
1838
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001839- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1840 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1841
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001842- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001843 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1844
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001845- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001846 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001847 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001848 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1849 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001850
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001851- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1852 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1853 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1854 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1855
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001856- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1857 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1858 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1859 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1860 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1861 #897625.
1862
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001863- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1864 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1865
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001866- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1867 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1868 and pops on either side of the deque.
1869
1870- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1871 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1872
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001873- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1874 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1875 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1876 other functions that expect a function argument.
1877
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001878- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1879
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001880- os.getsid was added.
1881
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001882- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1883 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1884 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1885
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001886- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1887
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001888- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1889
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001890- readline.clear_history was added.
1891
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001892- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1893
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001894- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1895
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001896- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1897
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001898- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1899
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001900- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1901
1902- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1903
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001904- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1905
1906- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1907
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001908- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1909 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1910 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1911
1912- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1913 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1914 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1915 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1916 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1917 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1918 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1919
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001920- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1921 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1922 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1923 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001924
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001925- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001926 iterators from a single iterable.
1927
1928- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1929 of raising a TypeError exception.
1930
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001931- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1932 as parameter.
1933
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001934Library
1935-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001936
Georg Brandlf0de6a12005-08-22 18:02:59 +00001937- Bug #1266283: The new function "lexists" is now in os.path.__all__.
1938
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001939- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1940 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1941 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001942
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001943- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1944 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1945 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001946
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001947- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001948
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001949- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1950 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001951
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001952- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1953 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1954
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001955- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1956
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001957- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001958 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001959
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001960- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001961 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001962
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001963- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1964
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001965- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1966 on cygwin and mingw32.
1967
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001968- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1969
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001970- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1971 module.
1972
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001973- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1974 installation scheme for all platforms.
1975
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001976- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001977 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001978
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001979- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1980 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1981 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1982
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001983- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1984 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1985 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1986
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001987- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1988
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001989- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1990
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001991- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1992 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1993
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001994- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1995 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1996 type pattern with the same value exists.
1997
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001998- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1999 when run from the command prompt).
2000
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00002001- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
2002 not taken into consideration when caching value.
2003
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00002004- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
2005 default sort).
2006
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00002007- Added global runctx function to profile module
2008
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00002009- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
2010
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00002011- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
2012
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00002013- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
2014
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002015- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00002016 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
2017 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
2018 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
2019 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
2020 accordingly.
2021
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00002022- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
2023 decoding standards.
2024
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00002025- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
2026 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
2027 called for all requests.
2028
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00002029- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
2030 they are passed to the compiler.
2031
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00002032- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
2033 indent, width and depth.
2034
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00002035- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
2036 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
2037
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00002038- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
2039 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
2040
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00002041- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
2042
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00002043- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
2044
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00002045- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
2046
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00002047- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
2048 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
2049
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00002050- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00002051 for better performance.
2052
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002053- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00002054
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00002055- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
2056 a string).
2057
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00002058- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
2059
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00002060- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
2061
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00002062- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
2063
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00002064- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
2065
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00002066- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
2067 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
2068 list of fieldnames.
2069
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00002070- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
2071 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
2072
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00002073- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
2074
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00002075- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
2076 empty lists.
2077
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00002078- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
2079 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
2080 and shelves.
2081
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00002082- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
2083 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
2084
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002085- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00002086 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
2087 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002088
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00002089- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
2090 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00002091 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00002092
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002093- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00002094 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
2095 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
2096
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002097- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
2098 and removed in Py2.4.
2099
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00002100- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
2101
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00002102- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
2103
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002104Tools/Demos
2105-----------
2106
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00002107- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
2108 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
2109
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00002110- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
2111
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00002112- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
2113 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
2114 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
2115 destination in situations where both files are given.
2116
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00002117- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
2118 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
2119 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
2120 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
2121
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00002122- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
2123
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00002124- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
2125 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
2126 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
2127 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
2128 now.
2129
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002130- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
2131 in effect
2132
2133- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
2134 C-c C-h
2135
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00002136- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
2137 -d option was given.
2138
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002139Build
2140-----
2141
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00002142- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
2143 build under OS X.
2144
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00002145- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
2146 --enable-profiling.
2147
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00002148- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
2149 is configured --with-tsc.
2150
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00002151- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
2152 on AMD64.
2153
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00002154- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
2155 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
2156
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00002157- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
2158 removed.
2159
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00002160- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
2161 supported (see PEP 11).
2162
2163- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
2164
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00002165- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
2166
2167- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
2168 (see PEP 11).
2169
2170- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
2171 sizeof(char) must be 1.
2172
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002173C API
2174-----
2175
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00002176- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
2177 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
2178 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
2179
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00002180- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
2181 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
2182 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
2183 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
2184
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00002185- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
2186 generator objects.
2187
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002188- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
2189 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00002190 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
2191 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002192
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00002193- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
2194 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
2195
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00002196- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
2197 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
2198 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
2199 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
2200 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
2201
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00002202- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
2203 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
2204 about 10% faster.
2205
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00002206- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
2207 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
2208
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00002209- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
2210 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
2211 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
2212 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
2213
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002214Windows
2215-------
2216
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00002217- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
2218 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
2219 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
2220 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
2221
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00002222- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
2223 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
2224 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
2225
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002226
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002227What's New in Python 2.3 final?
2228===============================
2229
2230*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
2231
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002232IDLE
2233----
2234
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00002235- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
2236 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
2237 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
2238 context-menu actions.
2239
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002240- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
2241 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
2242 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
2243 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
2244 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
2245 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
2246 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
2247 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
2248 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
2249
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002250
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002251What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
2252=============================================
2253
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00002254*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002255
2256Core and builtins
2257-----------------
2258
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002259- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002260 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002261 comment at the end are still unsupported.
2262
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002263Extension modules
2264-----------------
2265
2266- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
2267 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
2268 than once. This has been fixed.
2269
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002270- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2271 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2272 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2273 call.
2274
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002275- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2276
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002277Library
2278-------
2279
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002280- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2281 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2282
2283- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2284 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2285 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2286 restored.
2287
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002288IDLE
2289----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002290
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002291- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002292
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002293Build
2294-----
2295
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002296- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2297 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2298
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002299C API
2300-----
2301
2302Windows
2303-------
2304
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002305- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2306 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2307
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002308- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2309
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002310Mac
2311---
2312
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002313- Various fixes to pimp.
2314
2315- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2316
2317- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2318 more problems than it solves.
2319
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002320
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002321What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2322=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002323
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002324*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2325
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002326Core and builtins
2327-----------------
2328
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002329- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2330 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2331
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002332- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2333 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002334 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002335
2336- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2337 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2338 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002339 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002340
2341- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2342 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002343
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002344- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2345 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2346 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2347
2348- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002349 770247.
2350
2351- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002352
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002353Extension modules
2354-----------------
2355
2356- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2357 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2358
2359- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2360
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002361- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2362
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002363- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2364 contained within the _strptime module.
2365
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002366- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2367 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2368
2369- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002370 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2371
2372- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2373 the find_class attribute, if present.
2374
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002375- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002376
2377 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2378 (SF bug 763298).
2379
2380 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002381 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2382 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2383 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002384
2385 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2386
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002387Library
2388-------
2389
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002390- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2391
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002392- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2393 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2394 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2395 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2396 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2397 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2398 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2399 or Tester().
2400
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002401- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2402 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2403 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2404 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2405 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2406 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2407 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2408 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2409 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002410
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002411 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002412
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002413- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2414 weren't before was an oversight.
2415
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002416- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2417 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2418
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002419- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2420 when there are no lines.
2421
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002422- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2423 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2424
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002425- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2426 to child processes.
2427
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002428- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2429
2430- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2431
2432- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2433 xmlrpclib.
2434
2435- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2436 responses.
2437
2438- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2439 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2440
2441- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2442 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2443 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2444
2445- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2446 used as patterns.
2447
2448- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2449 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2450 than Tk 8.3.
2451
2452- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2453
2454- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002455
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002456Tools/Demos
2457-----------
2458
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002459- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2460
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002461- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2462
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002463- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002464
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002465Build
2466-----
2467
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002468- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2469
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002470- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2471
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002472- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2473 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002474
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002475- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2476 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2477 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002478
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002479C API
2480-----
2481
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002482- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2483 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2484
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002485Windows
2486-------
2487
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002488- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2489 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2490 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2491 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2492 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2493 Python exception ::
2494
2495 thread.error: can't start new thread
2496
2497 is raised now.
2498
2499- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2500 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2501 instead of from DLL teardown.
2502
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002503Mac
2504---
2505
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002506- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002507 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002508 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2509 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2510 the executable in the bundle.
2511
2512- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002513
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002514- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2515
2516- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2517 on Panther.
2518
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002519What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2520================================
2521
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002522*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002523
2524Core and builtins
2525-----------------
2526
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002527- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2528 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2529 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2530 with the -i option.
2531
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002532- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2533 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2534
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002535- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2536 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2537
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002538- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2539 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2540 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2541 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2542 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2543 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2544 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2545 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2546 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2547 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2548 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2549 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2550 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002551
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002552- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2553 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2554 embedded in a lambda expression.
2555
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002556- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2557 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2558 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2559 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2560 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2561
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002562- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2563 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2564 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2565
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002566- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2567 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2568
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002569- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2570 It's writable again.
2571
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002572- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2573 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2574 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002575 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002576
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002577- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2578 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2579 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2580
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002581Extension modules
2582-----------------
2583
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002584- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2585 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2586
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002587- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2588 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2589 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2590 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2591
2592- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2593 collection.
2594
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002595- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2596 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2597 unique within a single program run.
2598
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002599- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2600 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2601
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002602- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2603 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2604
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002605- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2606 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002607
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002608- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2609
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002610- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2611 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2612
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002613- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2614 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2615 for many BSD-derived systems.
2616
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002617
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002618Library
2619-------
2620
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002621- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2622 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2623 primary ones:
2624
2625 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2626 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2627 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2628
2629 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2630 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2631 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2632 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2633 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2634 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2635
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002636- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2637 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2638 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2639 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2640 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2641 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2642 argument.
2643
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002644- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2645 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2646 in the archive.
2647
2648- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2649 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2650
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002651- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2652 569574).
2653
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002654- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2655 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2656 no more.
2657
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002658- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2659 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2660 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2661 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2662 code coverage.
2663
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002664- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2665 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2666 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002667 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2668 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002669
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002670- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2671 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2672 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002673 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002674
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002675- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2676
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002677- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2678 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2679 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2680 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2681
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002682- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2683 handling.
2684
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002685- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2686 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2687
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002688- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2689 in socket.py.
2690
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002691- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2692
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002693- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2694 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2695 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2696 opener with proxy support.
2697
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002698- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2699
2700- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2701
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002702Tools/Demos
2703-----------
2704
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002705- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2706
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002707- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2708
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002709- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2710 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002711
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002712- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2713 files.
2714
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002715Build
2716-----
2717
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002718- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002719 different root directory.
2720
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002721C API
2722-----
2723
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002724- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2725 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2726 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2727 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2728 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2729 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2730 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2731 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2732 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2733 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2734
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002735- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2736 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2737 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2738 from Python.
2739
2740
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002741New platforms
2742-------------
2743
2744None this time.
2745
2746Tests
2747-----
2748
2749- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2750 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2751
2752Windows
2753-------
2754
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002755- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2756
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002757- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2758 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2759 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2760 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2761 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2762 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2763 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2764 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2765 that's what it's for.
2766
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002767Mac
2768---
2769
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002770- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2771 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2772 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2773 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002774- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2775 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2776- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002777
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002778SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2779------------------------------------
2780
2781430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2782598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2783622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2784661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2785683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2786697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2787713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2788724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2789727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2790729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2791730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2792731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2793732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2794733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2795735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2796740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2797744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2798745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2799747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2800749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2801751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2802753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2803755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2804757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2805760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2806
2807
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002808What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2809================================
2810
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002811*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002812
2813Core and builtins
2814-----------------
2815
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002816- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2817 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2818
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002819- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2820 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2821 and cannot be strings).
2822
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002823- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2824 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2825 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2826 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2827
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002828- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2829 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2830 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2831 Python itself.
2832
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002833- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2834 the referenced object, if it has one.
2835
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002836- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2837 the thread started at
2838 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2839
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002840- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2841 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2842 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2843 placed on a list index.
2844
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002845- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2846 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2847 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2848 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2849
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002850- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2851 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2852 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2853 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2854 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2855 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2856 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2857
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002858- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2859 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2860 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2861 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2862 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2863
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002864- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2865 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002866
2867- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2868 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2869 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2870 #693195.)
2871
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002872- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2873 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002874
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002875- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002876 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002877 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2878 interpreter executions, would fail.
2879
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002880- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002881 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002882 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002883
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002884Extension modules
2885-----------------
2886
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002887- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2888 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2889 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2890 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2891
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002892- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2893 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2894
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002895- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2896 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2897 and Greg Chapman.)
2898
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002899- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2900 recursively.
2901
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002902- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002903 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2904 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2905 leaks.
2906
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002907- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2908
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002909- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2910 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2911 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2912 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2913 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2914 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2915 #705836.
2916
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002917- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002918 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2919
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002920- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2921 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2922 See SF bug #692416.
2923
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002924- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2925 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2926
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002927- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2928 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2929 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002930
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002931- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002932 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2933 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2934
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002935- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2936 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2937 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2938 timeouts to work properly.
2939
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002940Library
2941-------
2942
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002943- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2944 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2945 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2946 future release.
2947
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002948- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2949 for querying platform dependent features.
2950
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002951- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002952
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002953- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2954 pickle protocol versions.
2955
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002956- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2957 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2958 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2959
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002960- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2961
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002962- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2963 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2964 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2965 modules.
2966
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002967- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2968 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2969 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2970
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002971- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2972 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2973
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002974- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2975 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2976 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2977
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002978- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002979 MS Office extensions.
2980
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002981- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2982 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2983
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002984- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2985 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2986
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002987- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2988 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2989 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2990 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2991 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2992 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2993
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002994- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2995 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2996 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002997
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002998- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2999 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
3000 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
3001
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00003002- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
3003
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00003004- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
3005 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
3006 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
3007
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003008Tools/Demos
3009-----------
3010
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00003011- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
3012 See the module docstring for details.
3013
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003014Build
3015-----
3016
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00003017- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
3018 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003019
3020C API
3021-----
3022
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003023- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
3024
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00003025- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
3026 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
3027 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
3028
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003029- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
3030 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00003031
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003032 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
3033 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
3034 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00003035
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00003036- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00003037 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
3038
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00003039- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
3040 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
3041 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003042
3043New platforms
3044-------------
3045
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00003046None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003047
3048Tests
3049-----
3050
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00003051- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
3052 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003053
3054Windows
3055-------
3056
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00003057- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
3058 function.
3059
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00003060- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
3061 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003062
3063Mac
3064---
3065
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00003066- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
3067 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00003068
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00003069- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
3070 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003071
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00003072- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
3073 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
3074 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003075
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003076- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00003077 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
3078 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003079
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003080- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
3081 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003082
3083
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003084What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
3085=================================
3086
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003087*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003088
3089Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003090-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003091
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00003092- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
3093 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
3094 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
3095
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00003096- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
3097 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
3098 (SF patch #664376.)
3099
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003100- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
3101 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
3102 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
3103 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
3104 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
3105 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00003106 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003107
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003108- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
3109 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
3110 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
3111 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003112 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003113
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00003114- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
3115 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
3116 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
3117 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
3118 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
3119 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
3120 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
3121 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
3122 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
3123 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
3124 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
3125
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00003126- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
3127 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
3128 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
3129 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
3130 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
3131 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
3132
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00003133- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
3134 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
3135
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00003136- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
3137 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
3138 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
3139 case.)
3140
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00003141- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
3142 passed as unicode strings.
3143
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00003144- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
3145 See SF bug #683467.
3146
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00003147- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
3148 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
3149
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00003150- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
3151
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00003152- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
3153
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00003154- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
3155 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
3156 arguments.
3157
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00003158- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
3159 See SF bug #667147.
3160
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003161- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003162 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003163 See SF bug #676155.
3164
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003165- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003166 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003167 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
3168 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
3169 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
3170 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
3171 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
3172 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003173
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003174Extension modules
3175-----------------
3176
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003177- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
3178 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3179 tp_as_number pointer.
3180
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003181- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
3182 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
3183 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
3184 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
3185 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
3186
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003187- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
3188
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00003189- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
3190
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003191- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00003192 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003193 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
3194 patch #678531.)
3195
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00003196- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
3197 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
3198
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00003199- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
3200 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
3201
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00003202- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
3203
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00003204- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
3205 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
3206 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
3207
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003208- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
3209
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003210- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
3211 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
3212
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003213- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003214
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003215- datetime changes:
3216
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00003217 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
3218
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003219 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
3220 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
3221 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
3222 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
3223 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
3224 now.
3225
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003226 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003227 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
3228 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003229
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003230 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003231 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003232 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
3233 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
3234 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
3235 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003236
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003237 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
3238 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
3239 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003240 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
3241
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003242 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
3243 by a later example coded by Guido.
3244
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003245 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003246 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
3247 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
3248 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003249 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
3250 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
3251
3252 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
3253 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
3254 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
3255 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
3256 tzinfo subclass instance.
3257
3258 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
3259 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
3260 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
3261 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
3262 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
3263 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
3264 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
3265 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003266
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003267 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
3268 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3269 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3270 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3271 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003272 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3273
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003274 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003275
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003276 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3277 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3278 as a naive datetime object.
3279
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003280 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3281 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3282 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3283
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003284 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3285 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3286 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3287 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3288 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3289 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3290 comparison.
3291
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003292 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3293 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3294 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3295 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003296 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003297
3298 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003299
3300 and ::
3301
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003302 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3303
3304 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3305 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3306 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3307 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3308
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003309 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3310 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3311 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3312 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3313 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3314
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003315 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3316 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003317 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3318 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003319
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003320Library
3321-------
3322
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003323- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3324 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3325
3326- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3327 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3328 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3329 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3330 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3331 See PEP 307 for details.
3332
3333- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3334 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3335
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003336- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3337 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003338 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003339 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3340 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003341 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003342
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003343- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3344 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3345
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003346- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3347 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3348 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3349
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003350- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3351
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003352- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3353 exception.
3354
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003355- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3356 class.
3357
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003358- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3359 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3360 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3361
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003362- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3363 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3364
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003365- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003366 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3367 See SF bug #659228.
3368
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003369- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3370 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3371 See SF patch #651082.
3372
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003373- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003374
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003375- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3376 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3377
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003378- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003379 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003380
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003381- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3382 DOS paths from other platforms.
3383
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003384Tools/Demos
3385-----------
3386
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003387- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3388 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3389 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3390 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3391 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3392 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3393 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3394 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3395 example:
3396
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003397 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3398 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003399
3400 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3401
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003402
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003403Build
3404-----
3405
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003406- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3407 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3408 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003409 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3410
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003411 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3412
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003413- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3414 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3415 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3416 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3417 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3418 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3419 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3420 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3421 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3422
3423- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3424 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3425 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3426 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3427
3428- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3429 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3430
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003431C API
3432-----
3433
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003434- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3435 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003436
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003437- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3438 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3439 tp_as_number pointer.
3440
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003441- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3442 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3443 (SF #681367)
3444
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003445- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3446 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3447 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3448 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003449
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003450Tests
3451-----
3452
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003453- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003454 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3455 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3456 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3457 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3458 pydoc.)
3459
3460- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3461
3462- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003463
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003464Windows
3465-------
3466
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003467- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3468 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3469 time).
3470
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003471- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3472 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3473
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003474- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3475 release without strong cryptography.
3476
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003477- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003478 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003479
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003480- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3481 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3482
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003483Mac
3484---
3485
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003486- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3487 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003488
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003489- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3490 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3491 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003492
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003493- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3494 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003495
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003496- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3497 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3498 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3499 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003500
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003501- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003502 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3503 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3504 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003505
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003506
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003507What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003508=================================
3509
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003510*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003511
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003512Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003513--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003514
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003515- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3516
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003517- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3518 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003519 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003520 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003521 a different meaning than before.
3522
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003523- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003524 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003525 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003526
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003527- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003528 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003529 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003530
3531- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3532 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3533 and deallocation.
3534
3535- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3536 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3537
3538- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3539 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3540 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3541 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3542 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3543
3544- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3545 now detected by the garbage collector.
3546
3547- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3548 [SF bug 519621]
3549
3550- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3551 identifier.
3552
3553- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3554 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3555 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3556 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3557 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3558 [SF bug 563060]
3559
3560- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3561 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3562 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3563 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3564 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3565
3566- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3567 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3568 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3569
3570- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3571
3572- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3573 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3574 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3575 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3576 state of the slots would be lost.)
3577
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003578Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003579-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003580
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003581- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003582 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3583 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3584 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3585 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003586 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3587 Jython 2.1.
3588
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003589- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003590 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003591 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3592 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3593 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3594 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3595 these, see PEP 302.
3596
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003597- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3598 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3599 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3600
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003601- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3602 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3603 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3604
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003605- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3606 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3607 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3608
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003609- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3610 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3611 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3612 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3613 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3614 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3615 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3616 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3617 releases or implementations.
3618
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003619- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003620 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3621 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003622
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003623- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3624 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3625
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003626- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3627 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3628 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3629
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003630- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3631 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3632
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003633- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3634 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003635 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3636 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003637
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003638- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3639 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3640 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3641 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3642 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3643
3644 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3645 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3646 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3647 pattern.
3648
3649 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3650 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3651 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3652 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3653
3654 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3655 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3656 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3657 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3658 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3659 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3660
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003661- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3662 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3663 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3664 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3665 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3666 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3667 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3668 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003669
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003670- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3671 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3672 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3673 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3674 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003675 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3676 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3677 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3678 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3679 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3680 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3681 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003682
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003683- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3684 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3685
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003686- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3687 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3688 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3689 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3690 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3691 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3692 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3693 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3694 to Zack Weinberg!
3695
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003696- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3697 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3698 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3699 type. This has been fixed now.
3700
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003701- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3702 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3703 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3704
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003705- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3706 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3707 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3708 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3709 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3710 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3711 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3712 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003713 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003714
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003715- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3716 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3717 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003718
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003719- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3720 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3721 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3722 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3723 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3724 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3725 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3726 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003727 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003728 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3729 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3730
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003731- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3732 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3733 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3734 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3735 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3736 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3737 this.)
3738
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003739- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3740 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003741 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003742 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003743 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3744 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003745 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3746 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003747
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003748- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3749 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3750 currently running.
3751
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003752- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3753 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3754 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3755 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3756
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003757- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3758 as directory names.
3759
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003760- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3761 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3762
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003763- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3764 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3765
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003766- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003767 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3768 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003769
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003770- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3771 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3772 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3773 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3774 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3775
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003776- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3777 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3778 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3779 removed.
3780
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003781- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3782 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3783 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3784
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003785- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3786 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3787 to __debug__.
3788
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003789- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3790 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3791 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3792
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003793- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3794 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3795 deprecated now.
3796
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003797- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3798 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3799 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003800
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003801- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3802 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3803 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3804 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3805 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003806
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003807- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3808 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3809
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003810- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3811 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3812 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003813 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003814 is backward compatible.
3815
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003816- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3817 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3818 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3819 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3820 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3821
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003822- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3823 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3824 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3825 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3826 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3827 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003828
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003829- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3830 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3831
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003832- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3833 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3834
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003835- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3836 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3837 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3838 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3839 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3840
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003841- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3842 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3843 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3844
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003845- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003846 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3847
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003848- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3849 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3850 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003851
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003852- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3853 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3854
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003855- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3856 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3857 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3858
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003859- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3860
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003861Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003862-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003863
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003864- Added three operators to the operator module:
3865 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3866 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3867 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3868
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003869- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3870
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003871- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3872 archives.
3873
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003874- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3875 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3876 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3877
3878 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3879
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003880- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3881 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3882 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003883 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003884
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003885- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3886 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3887 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3888 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003889 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3890 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3891 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3892 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003893
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003894- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3895 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003896
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003897- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3898
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003899- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3900 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3901
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003902- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3903 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3904 supported.
3905
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003906- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3907
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003908- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3909 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003910
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003911- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3912 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3913
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003914- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3915
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003916- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3917 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3918
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003919- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3920 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3921 functions but callable type objects.
3922
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003923- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003924 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003925 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003926
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003927- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3928 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003929
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003930- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3931 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003932
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003933- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3934 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3935 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3936 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3937
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003938- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3939 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003940
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003941- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3942 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3943 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3944 and __imul__.
3945
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003946- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003947 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3948 is called.
3949
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003950- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3951 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3952 interpreter was compiled.
3953
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003954- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3955 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3956 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003957 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003958 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3959 1, not 2.
3960
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003961- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3962 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3963 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3964 limit.
3965
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003966- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3967 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3968 bug #623464.
3969
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003970- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3971 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3972 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3973 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3974
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003975Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003976-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003977
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003978- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3979
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003980- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3981 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3982 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3983 with Python 2.3a2.
3984
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003985- os.path exposes getctime.
3986
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003987- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003988 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003989 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003990 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003991 unit tests of floating point results.
3992
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003993- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3994 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3995 has been increased.
3996
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003997- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3998 executed.
3999
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00004000- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
4001 postinstallation script.
4002
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00004003- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
4004 test the current module.
4005
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004006- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00004007 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
4008 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
4009 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
4010 this behavior needs to be controlled.
4011
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00004012- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00004013 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00004014 Ward's Optik package.
4015
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00004016- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
4017 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
4018 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
4019 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
4020
4021- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
4022 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00004023 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00004024
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00004025- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
4026 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
4027 shelf are binary pickles.
4028
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00004029- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
4030 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
4031
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00004032- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
4033 modules are iterators now.
4034
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00004035- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
4036 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
4037 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
4038 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
4039 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
4040 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004041
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00004042- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
4043 with their entity value.
4044
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00004045- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
4046
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004047- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
4048 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00004049
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004050- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
4051 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004052 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00004053
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00004054- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
4055 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
4056 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
4057 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
4058 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
4059 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
4060 main():
4061
4062 import locale
4063 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
4064
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00004065- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
4066 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
4067
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00004068- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
4069 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
4070 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
4071 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
4072 to the new standard.
4073
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00004074- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
4075 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
4076 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
4077 an extension to the database.
4078
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004079- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
4080 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
4081 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
4082 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00004083 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004084
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004085- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00004086 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004087
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00004088- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
4089 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
4090 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
4091 bounded integers.
4092
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00004093- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
4094 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
4095 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
4096 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
4097 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
4098 in existence.
4099
4100 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
4101 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
4102 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
4103 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
4104 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
4105 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
4106
4107 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
4108 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
4109 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
4110 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
4111
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00004112- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
4113 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
4114 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
4115
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00004116- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
4117
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004118- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
4119 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
4120 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
4121 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
4122
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00004123- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
4124 argument.
4125
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00004126- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
4127 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
4128 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
4129 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
4130 [SF patch 560794].
4131
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004132- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
4133 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
4134 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00004135 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
4136 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
4137 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004138
4139- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
4140 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00004141
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00004142- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
4143 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
4144 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
4145 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00004146
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00004147- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
4148 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
4149 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
4150 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
4151 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
4152
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004153- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00004154
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00004155- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
4156
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00004157- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
4158 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
4159 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
4160 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
4161 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
4162 identical to None.
4163
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00004164- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
4165 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
4166 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
4167 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
4168 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
4169 results now.
4170
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00004171- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
4172 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
4173
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004174- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
4175 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
4176 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
4177 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
4178 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
4179 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
4180 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
4181 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
4182
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00004183- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
4184
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00004185- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
4186 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
4187
4188- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
4189 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
4190 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
4191 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
4192 and other systems.
4193
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004194- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
4195 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
4196 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
4197 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 +00004198 work well with these.
4199
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00004200- compileall now supports quiet operation.
4201
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004202- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00004203 connections.
4204
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00004205- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
4206 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
4207 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
4208
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00004209- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
4210 sets
4211
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00004212- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
4213 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
4214 name.
4215
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00004216- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
4217 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
4218 passed in.
4219
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004220- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00004221 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00004222 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
4223 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00004224
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00004225- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
4226
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00004227- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
4228
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00004229- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
4230 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
4231 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
4232
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004233- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
4234 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
4235 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
4236 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00004237 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004238
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004239- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004240 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004241 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004242
4243- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
4244 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
4245 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
4246
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004247- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00004248 the value of its expression argument.
4249
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004250- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
4251 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
4252 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
4253
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00004254- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
4255 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
4256 skipstone browser was included.
4257
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00004258- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
4259 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
4260
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004261Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004262-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004263
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00004264- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
4265 names in addition to accepting file names.
4266
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00004267- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
4268 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4269 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4270 still used and useful.)
4271
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004272- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4273 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4274 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4275 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004276
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004277- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4278 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4279 the generated binary.
4280
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004281Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004282-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004283
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004284- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4285
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004286- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4287 except in the hands of experts.
4288
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004289- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004290 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4291 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4292 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004293
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004294- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4295 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4296 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4297 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4298 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4299 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4300 builds.
4301
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004302- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4303 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4304 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4305 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4306 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4307 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4308 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4309 new type.
4310
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004311- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004312
4313 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4314 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4315 positive infinities.
4316
4317 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4318 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4319 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4320 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4321 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4322 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4323 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4324
4325 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4326
4327 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4328
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004329- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4330 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4331 size of the executable.
4332
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004333- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4334 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4335 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4336 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004337
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004338- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4339
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004340- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4341 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4342 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004343
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004344- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4345 well as Unix.
4346
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004347- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4348 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4349 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4350 modules in the README file for details.
4351
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004352C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004353-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004354
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004355- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4356 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004357 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004358 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004359 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004360
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004361- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4362 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4363 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4364 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4365 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4366 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004367 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004368 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4369 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4370 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4371 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4372 aligned.)
4373
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004374- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4375 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4376 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4377
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004378- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4379 level.
4380
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004381- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4382 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4383 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4384 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4385 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4386
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004387- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4388 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4389 code.
4390
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004391- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4392 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4393 adjusting for negative indices.
4394
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004395- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4396 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4397 object.
4398
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004399- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4400 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4401 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4402
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004403- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4404 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004405
4406- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4407
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004408- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4409 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4410 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4411 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4412
4413- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4414
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004415- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004416
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004417- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004418 without going through the buffer API.
4419
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004420- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004421
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004422- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4423 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4424 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4425 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4426
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004427- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4428 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4429
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004430- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004431 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4432
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004433New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004434-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004435
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004436- OpenVMS is now supported.
4437
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004438- AtheOS is now supported.
4439
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004440- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4441
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004442- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4443
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004444Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004445-----
4446
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004447- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4448 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4449 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004450
4451Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004452-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004453
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004454- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4455 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4456 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4457 bugs.
4458 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004459 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004460 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4461 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004462 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004463
4464- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004465 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004466
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004467- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4468 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4469
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004470- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4471 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004472 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004473 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4474
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004475- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4476 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4477 use files" uninstall option).
4478
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004479- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4480
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004481- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4482 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4483
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004484- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4485 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4486 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4487
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004488- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4489 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4490 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4491 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4492 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004493 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4494 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4495 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004496
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004497- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004498 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004499 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4500 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4501 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4502 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4503 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4504 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4505 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4506 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4507 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4508 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4509 work around.
4510
4511- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4512 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4513 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4514 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4515 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4516 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4517 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4518 specified with O_CREAT too).
4519
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004520Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004521----
4522
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004523- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004524
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004525- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4526 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4527 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4528
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004529- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4530 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4531 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4532
4533- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4534 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4535 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4536 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4537 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4538 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4539 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4540 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004541
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004542- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4543 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4544 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004545
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004546- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4547 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4548 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4549 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4550 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004551
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004552- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4553 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4554 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004555
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004556- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4557 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004558
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004559- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4560 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4561 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4562 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4563 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004564
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004565- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4566 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4567 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4568
4569- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4570 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4571 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004572
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004573- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4574 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4575 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4576 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004577 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004578
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004579- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4580 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004581
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004582- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4583 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004584
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004585- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004586 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004587 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4588 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004589
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004590
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004591What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004592===============================
4593
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004594*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4595
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004596Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004597--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004598
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004599- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4600 with a custom metaclass.
4601
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004602Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004603-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004604
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004605- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4606 are proxies.
4607
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004608Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004609-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004610
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004611- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4612 very short strings.
4613
4614- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4615 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4616 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4617 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4618 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4619
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004620Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004621-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004622
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004623- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4624 close or delete time).
4625
4626- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4627 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4628
4629- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4630
4631- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004632 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004633
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004634Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004635-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004636
4637Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004638-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004639
4640C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004641-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004642
4643New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004644-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004645
4646Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004647-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004648
4649Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004650-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004651
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004652- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4653
4654- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4655 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4656
4657- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4658 deleted at process exit time.
4659
4660- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4661 in backslash.
4662
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004663Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004664----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004665
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004666- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4667 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4668 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4669
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004670
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004671What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004672===========================
4673
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004674*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4675
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004676Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004677--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004678
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004679- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4680 been extensively updated. See
4681
4682 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4683
4684 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4685
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004686- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4687 deleted!
4688
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004689- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4690 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4691 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4692 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4693 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4694
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004695- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4696
4697 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4698 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4699
4700 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4701 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4702 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4703 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4704 supported anyway.
4705
4706 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4707 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4708
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004709- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4710 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4711 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4712 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4713 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004714
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004715- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4716 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4717 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4718
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004719Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004720-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004721
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004722- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4723 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4724 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4725 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4726 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4727 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004728 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4729 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4730 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4731 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004732
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004733- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4734 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4735 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4736
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004737Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004738-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004739
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004740- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4741
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004742Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004743-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004744
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004745- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4746 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4747 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4748 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4749 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4750 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4751
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004752- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4753
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004754- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4755
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004756- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4757
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004758- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4759 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4760 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4761
4762- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4763
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004764Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004765-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004766
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004767- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4768 off a search on Google.
4769
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004770Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004771-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004772
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004773- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4774 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4775 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4776 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4777 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4778 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4779 other platforms should do likewise.
4780
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004781- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4782 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4783 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4784
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004785C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004786-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004787
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004788- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4789 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4790 producing key-value pairs.
4791
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004792- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004793 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004794 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4795 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4796 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4797 previously went unchallenged.
4798
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004799New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004800-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004801
4802Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004803-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004804
4805Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004806-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004807
4808Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004809----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004810
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004811- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4812 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004813
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004814- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4815 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4816 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4817 home.
4818
4819
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004820What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004821===========================
4822
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004823*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4824
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004825Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004826--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004827
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004828- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4829 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004830
4831 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004832 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004833
4834 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4835 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004836 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004837 This needs to be documented.
4838
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004839- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4840 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4841
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004842- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4843 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4844 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4845
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004846- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4847 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4848
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004849- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4850 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4851 class forbids it).
4852
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004853- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4854 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4855 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4856
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004857- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4858
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004859Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004860-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004861
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004862- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4863 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004864 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004865
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004866- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4867 (like 1 + '').
4868
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004869Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004870-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004871
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004872- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4873 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4874 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4875 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004876 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004877 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4878
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004879- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4880 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4881 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4882 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4883
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004884- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4885 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004886 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4887 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4888 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004889
4890- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4891 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004892
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004893- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4894 bytes on its input.
4895
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004896Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004897-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004898
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004899- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004900 convenience function.
4901
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004902- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4903 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4904 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004905 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4906 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4907 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4908 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4909 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4910 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004911
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004912- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4913 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4914 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4915 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4916
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004917- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4918 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4919 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4920
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004921- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4922 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4923 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4924 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4925
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004926- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4927 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004928 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004929 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4930 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4931 new -l and -e options.
4932
4933- statcache is now deprecated.
4934
4935- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4936 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004937 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004938 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4939 time properly taken into account.
4940
4941- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4942 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4943 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4944 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4945
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004946Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004947-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004948
4949Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004950-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004951
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004952- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4953 is built with libdb3 if available.
4954
4955- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4956
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004957C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004958-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004959
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004960- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4961 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4962 PySequence_Size().
4963
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004964- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4965
4966- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4967 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4968 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4969
4970- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4971 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4972
4973- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4974 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4975
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004976New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004977-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004978
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004979- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4980 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4981
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004982- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4983 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4984
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004985- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4986
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004987Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004988-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004989
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004990- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4991 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4992
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004993Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004994-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004995
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004996Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004997----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004998
4999- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
5000 removed completely in the next release.
5001
5002- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
5003 OSX.
5004
5005- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
5006 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
5007
5008- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
5009
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005010
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005011What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005012===========================
5013
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005014*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
5015
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005016Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005017--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005018
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005019- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005020 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005021 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005022 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
5023 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005024 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
5025 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005026 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
5027 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00005028
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00005029- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
5030 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
5031
5032- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
5033 class methods, static methods, and properties.
5034
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005035Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005036-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005037
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00005038- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
5039 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
5040 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
5041 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
5042 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
5043 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
5044 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
5045 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
5046
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005047- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
5048 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
5049 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
5050 example).
5051
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005052- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005053 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005054 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005055 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005056
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005057- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
5058 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
5059 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00005060 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005061
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005062- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
5063 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
5064 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
5065 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
5066 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
5067 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
5068
5069 isinstance(x, (A, B))
5070
5071 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
5072
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005073Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005074-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005075
5076- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
5077
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005078- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
5079
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005080- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
5081 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00005082
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005083- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
5084 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
5085 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
5086 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
5087 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
5088 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00005089 attributes.
5090
5091- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
5092 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
5093 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00005094
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005095- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
5096 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
5097 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005098
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005099- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
5100 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
5101 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005102 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
5103 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
5104
5105- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
5106 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005107
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005108Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005109-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005110
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00005111- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
5112 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
5113
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005114- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
5115 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
5116 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
5117 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
5118
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00005119- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
5120 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
5121 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
5122 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
5123
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00005124 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
5125 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
5126 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
5127 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
5128 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
5129 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
5130 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
5131 without losing information).
5132
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005133- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005134 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
5135 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
5136 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
5137 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
5138 module).
5139
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00005140 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005141 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
5142 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
5143 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
5144 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005145
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005146- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00005147 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
5148 encoding.
5149
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00005150- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
5151 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
5152
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005153- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005154 to allow saving the message body to a file.
5155
5156- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
5157 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
5158 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
5159 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
5160
5161- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
5162
5163- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
5164 ON, and OFF.
5165
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005166- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
5167 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
5168
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005169Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005170-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005171
5172- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
5173 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
5174 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005175
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005176- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
5177 been added: -X and -E.
5178
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005179Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005180-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005181
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005182- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
5183 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
5184
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005185C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005186-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005187
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00005188- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
5189 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
5190 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
5191 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
5192 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
5193
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00005194- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
5195 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
5196 as long) arguments.
5197
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005198- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
5199 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
5200 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
5201 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
5202 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
5203 report any bugs or strange behavior).
5204
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005205- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
5206 input.
5207
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005208New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005209-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005210
5211Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005212-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005213
5214Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005215-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005216
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00005217- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
5218 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
5219 is created for .py and .pyw files.
5220
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005221- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
5222 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
5223 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005224 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005225
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005226 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
5227 # (SIGINT) behavior.
5228 import signal
5229 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005230
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005231 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005232 while 1:
5233 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005234 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005235 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
5236 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
5237 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
5238 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005239
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005240
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005241What's New in Python 2.2a4?
5242===========================
5243
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005244*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
5245
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005246Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005247--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005248
5249- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
5250 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
5251 documentation for all operations on list objects.
5252
5253- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
5254 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
5255 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
5256 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
5257 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
5258 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
5259 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005260
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005261- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005262 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005263 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
5264 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
5265 associate a docstring with a property.
5266
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005267- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
5268 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5269 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5270 other built-in object types.
5271
5272- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5273 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5274 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5275 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5276 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5277
5278- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5279 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5280
5281- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5282 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005283 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005284 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5285 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5286 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5287 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5288 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5289
5290- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5291 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5292 class.
5293
5294- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5295 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5296 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5297 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5298
5299- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5300 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5301 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5302 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5303
5304- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5305 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5306
5307- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5308 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5309 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5310 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5311 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005312 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005313 with the same value as s.
5314
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005315- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5316
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005317Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005318----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005319
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005320- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5321
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005322- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5323 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5324 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5325 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5326 objects.
5327
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005328- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5329 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005330 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5331 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5332
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005333- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5334 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5335 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5336
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005337Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005338-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005339
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005340- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5341 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5342 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5343 by the instances.
5344
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005345- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5346 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5347 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5348
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005349- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5350 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5351 before the entire comparison is complete.
5352
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005353- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5354 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5355 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5356
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005357- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5358 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5359 getwriter().
5360
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005361- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5362 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5363
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005364- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005365 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5366 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5367
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005368- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5369 iterable object.
5370
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005371- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5372 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005373
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005374- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5375 authentication.
5376
5377- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5378 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005379
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005380- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005381 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5382 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5383 a sample driver.)
5384
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005385Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005386-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005387
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005388- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5389 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5390 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5391 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5392 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5393 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5394 kernel has large file support.
5395
5396- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5397 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5398 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5399 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5400 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5401
5402- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5403 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5404 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5405
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005406C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005407-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005408
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005409- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5410 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5411
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005412New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005413-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005414
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005415- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5416 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5417
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005418Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005419-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005420
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005421- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5422 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5423 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5424 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5425 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5426
5427- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5428 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5429 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5430 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5431
5432- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5433 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5434
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005435Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005436-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005437
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005438- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005439 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5440 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005441
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005442
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005443What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5444===========================
5445
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005446*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5447
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005448Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005449----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005450
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005451- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5452 big to represent as a C double.
5453
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005454- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5455 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5456 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5457 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5458 restriction).
5459
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005460- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5461 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5462 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5463 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5464 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5465
5466 >>> dir([])
5467 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5468 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5469 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5470 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5471 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5472 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5473 'reverse', 'sort']
5474
5475 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5476
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005477- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005478 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5479 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5480 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5481 OverflowError exception.
5482
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005483- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005484 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005485 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5486 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5487 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5488 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5489 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005490 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005491 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5492 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5493
5494 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5495 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5496 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5497 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005498
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005499- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005500 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5501 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5502 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5503 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5504 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5505 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5506 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5507 once it is created.
5508
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005509- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5510 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5511 (key, value) pairs.
5512
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005513- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005514 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5515 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5516
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005517- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5518 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5519 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5520 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5521 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005522
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005523- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005524 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5525 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5526
5527 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5528
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005529- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005530 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5531
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005532Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005533-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005534
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005535- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005536 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5537 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005538
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005539- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5540 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5541 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5542 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5543 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5544 in this area anymore).
5545
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005546- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5547 threading.Timer.
5548
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005549- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5550 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5551
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005552- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005553 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5554
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005555- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005556 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5557 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5558 converted to Python longs.
5559
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005560- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005561 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5562
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005563- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5564 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5565 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5566
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005567Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005568-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005569
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005570- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5571 division operators as per PEP 238.
5572
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005573Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005574-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005575
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005576- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5577 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5578 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5579 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5580
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005581C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005582-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005583
5584- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005585
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005586- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5587 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005588 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005589
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005590 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5591 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005592 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005593 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005594
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005595- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005596 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5597 module:
5598
5599 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005600
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005601 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5602 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005603
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005604 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5605 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005606
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005607 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5608
5609 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5610
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005611- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005612 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5613 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5614 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005615
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005616New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005617-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005618
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005619- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5620 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5621 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5622 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5623 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005624
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005625Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005626-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005627
5628Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005629-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005630
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005631- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5632 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5633 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5634 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005635 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5636 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5637 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5638 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5639 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005640
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005641- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005642 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5643
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005644
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005645What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5646===========================
5647
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005648*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5649
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005650Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005651-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005652
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005653- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5654 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5655
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005656- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5657 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5658 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005659
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005660- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5661 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5662 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5663 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005664
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005665- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5666
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005667- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005668
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005669Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005670-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005671
5672- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005673 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005674 the module docstring for details.
5675
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005676Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005677-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005678
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005679- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005680 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5681 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5682 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005683
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005684- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5685 Nick Mathewson.
5686
5687Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005688----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005689
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005690- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5691 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5692 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5693 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5694 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5695 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5696 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5697 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5698
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005699- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5700 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5701 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5702 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5703
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005704- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5705 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5706 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5707 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5708 come a long way).
5709
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005710- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5711 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5712 write filters for these warnings).
5713
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005714- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5715 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5716 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5717 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5718 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5719
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005720- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5721 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5722 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5723 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5724 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5725 older distribution.
5726
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005727Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005728-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005729
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005730- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5731 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005732 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005733
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005734- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5735 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5736 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5737
5738- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5739
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005740- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5741
5742- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5743
5744- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5745
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005746- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005747
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005748- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5749
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005750New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005751-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005752
5753C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005754-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005755
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005756- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5757 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5758 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5759 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5760 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5761 against buffer overruns.
5762
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005763- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005764 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5765 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005766 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5767 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5768 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5769
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005770- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5771 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5772 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5773 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5774 deprecated.
5775
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005776Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005777-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005778
5779- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5780 relevant is found.
5781
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005782
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005783What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005784===========================
5785
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005786*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5787
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005788Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005789----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005790
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005791- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5792 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5793 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5794 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5795 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5796 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5797 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5798 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005799 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005800 repaired.
5801
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005802- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005803 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005804 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5805 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5806 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5807 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5808 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5809 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5810 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5811 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5812
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005813- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5814 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5815 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5816 leading BMO character).
5817
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005818- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5819 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5820 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5821
5822 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5823 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5824 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005825
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005826 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5827 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5828 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5829 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5830 for various simple to use conversions.
5831
5832 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5833 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5834
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005835 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5836 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5837 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5838 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5839 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5840 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5841 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5842 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5843 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5844 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5845 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5846 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5847 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5848 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5849 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005850
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005851- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5852 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5853 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005854 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005855 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005856
5857 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005858 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5859 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5860 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5861 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5862 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005863 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5864 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005865
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005866 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5867 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5868 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005869 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005870
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005871- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5872 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5873 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5874 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5875 floating arithmetic,
5876
5877 x = 9007199254740992.0
5878 print long(x)
5879
5880 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5881 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5882 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5883 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5884 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5885 functions are of good quality).
5886
5887 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5888 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5889 algorithms to break.
5890
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005891- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5892 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5893 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5894 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5895 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5896 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5897 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5898 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5899 order.
5900
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005901- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5902 operation along the most common code paths.
5903
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005904- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5905 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5906
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005907- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5908 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5909 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5910 {}.update(UserDict())
5911
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005912- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5913 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5914 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5915 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5916 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5917 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5918 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5919 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5920
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005921- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005922 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005923
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005924 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005925 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5926 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005927 join() method of strings
5928 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005929 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5930 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005931 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005932 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005933
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005934- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5935 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5936
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005937- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5938 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5939
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005940- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5941 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5942 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5943 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5944
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005945- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5946 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005947 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005948 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5949 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005950
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005951- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5952
5953
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005954Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005955-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005956
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005957- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005958 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005959 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5960 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5961
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005962- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5963 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5964
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005965- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5966 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5967 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5968 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5969
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005970- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5971 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5972 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5973
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005974- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5975
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005976- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5977
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005978- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5979 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5980 that are still imported into string.py).
5981
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005982- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5983
5984- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5985 Now it does.
5986
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005987- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5988
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005989- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5990 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5991 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5992 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5993 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005994 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5995 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005996
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005997- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5998 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5999 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
6000 'help(object)'.
6001
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006002Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006003-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006004
6005- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006006 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006007 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
6008 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
6009
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006010- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00006011 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
6012 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006013
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00006014C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006015-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00006016
6017- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
6018 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006019
6020----
6021
6022**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**