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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
Raymond Hettinger9f1a6792005-07-31 01:16:36 +000015- The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
16 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
17 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
18
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +000019- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
20
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +000021- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
22 reference counts in some error exit cases.
23
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000024- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
25 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
26 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
27 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
28 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
29 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
30 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
31 realloc.
32
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +000033- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
34 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
35
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +000036- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
37 like their int counterparts.
38
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +000039- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
40 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
41 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
42 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
43 for a longer write-up of the problem).
44
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +000045- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
46 serializing floats.
47
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +000048- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
49 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
50 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
51
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +000052- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
53 278.
54
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +000055- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
56 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
57 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
58 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
59 to the base class has been moved the prroper nb_* magic slot and out of
60 PyNumber_*().
61 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
62
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +000063- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
64 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
65 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
66 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
67
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +000068- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
69 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
70 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
71 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
72 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
73
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +000074- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
75 disabled caused a crash.
76
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +000077- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
78 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
79
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000080- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000081 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
82
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +000083- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
84
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +000085- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +000086 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
87 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
88 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +000089
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +000090- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
91
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +000092- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
93 returning None.
94
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000095- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +000096 ('\') with a specific error message.
97
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +000098- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
99
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +0000100- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
101 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
102
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000103- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000104 an ferror() call.
105
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000106- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
107 list.sort().
108
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000109- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
110 (2+3) --> (5).
111
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000112- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
113
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000114- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
115 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000116
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000117- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
118 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
119 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
120
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000121Extension Modules
122-----------------
123
Martin v. Löwisebd9d5b2005-08-09 15:00:59 +0000124- Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
125 st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
126
Michael W. Hudson8137bea2005-07-27 20:24:40 +0000127- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
128 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
129 for large or negative values.
130
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000131- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000132 implemented treated all integer values except 1 as false.
133
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000134- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
135
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000136- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
137 if available on the platform.
138
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000139- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
140 available on the platform.
141
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000142- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
143 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
144
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000145- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
146
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000147- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
148 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
149 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
150
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000151- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
152
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000153- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
154 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
155
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000156- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000157 file size.
158
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000159- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
160
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000161- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
162 {remove_history,replace_history}
163
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000164- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
165 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000166
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000167- stat_float_times is now True.
168
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000169- array.array objects are now picklable.
170
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000171- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
172 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
173
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000174- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
175 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
176 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
177
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000178- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
179 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000180
181Library
182-------
183
Martin v. Löwisb813c532005-08-07 20:51:04 +0000184- Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
185
Georg Brandl649f8e72005-08-03 07:30:12 +0000186- Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
187 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
188
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000189- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
190 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
191 Tkdnd.
192
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000193- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
194 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
195
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000196- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
197 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
198
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000199- textwrap now processes text chucks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
200 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
201
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000202- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
203 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
204
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000205- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
206 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
207
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000208- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
209 though this can be missing in embedded interpreters
210
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000211- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
212
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000213- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
214 error messages.
215
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000216- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
217
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000218- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
219 Bug #1224621.
220
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000221- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
222 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
223 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
224 terminates by raising StopIteration.
225
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000226- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
227
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000228- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
229 component of the path.
230
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000231- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
232 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
233 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
234 class at all.
235
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000236- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
237 files to PyPI.
238
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000239- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
240 them to PyPI.
241
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000242- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
243 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
244 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
245 work as expected.
246
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000247- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
248 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
249
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000250- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000251 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
252
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000253- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
254
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000255- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
256 to build.
257
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000258- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
259 symbolic links on Windows.
260
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000261- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000262 profile.py if available.
263
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000264- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
265
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000266- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
267 in LWPCookieJar.
268
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000269- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
270
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000271- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
272
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000273- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
274
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000275- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
276
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000277- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
278
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000279- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
280
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000281- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
282
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000283- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
284
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000285- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
286 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
287 be exploited in various ways.
288
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000289- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
290
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000291- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
292
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000293- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
294
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000295- Enhancements to the csv module:
296
297 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000298 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000299 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000300 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
301 reporting.
302 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
303 dictates.
304 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000305 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000306 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000307 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
308 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000309 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
310 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000311 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000312 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
313 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
314 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
315 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
316 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
317 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
318 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
319 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
320 without first creating a dialect class.
321 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
322 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
323 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000324 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000325 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
326 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000327 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
328 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
329 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
330 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000331 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
332 This has been fixed.
333
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000334- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
335 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
336 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
337 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
338
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000339- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
340
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000341- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
342 (Bug #951915).
343
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000344- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
345 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
346 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
347 encoding alias table
348
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000349- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
350
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000351- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
352 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
353
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000354- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
355
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000356- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
357
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000358- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
359
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000360- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
361
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000362- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
363
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000364- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
365 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
366 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
367
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000368- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000369 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000370
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000371- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
372 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
373 tokenizer with very long source lines.
374
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000375- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
376 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
377
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000378- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
379 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000380
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000381- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
382 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
383
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000384- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
385 correctly.
386
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000387- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
388 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
389 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
390 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
391 between two lines.
392
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000393
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000394Build
395-----
396
Martin v. Löwis147fbe52005-08-07 21:09:30 +0000397- Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
398 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
399
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000400- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
401 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
402
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000403- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
404 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
405 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000406 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000407
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000408- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
409 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
410 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
411
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000412- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
413
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000414- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
415 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
416
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000417- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
418 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
419 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
420 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
421 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
422 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
423 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
424 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
425
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000426- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
427 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
428 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
429 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
430
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000431
432C API
433-----
434
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000435- Removed PyRange_New().
436
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000437
438Tests
439-----
440
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000441- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000442
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000443
444Documentation
445-------------
446
Georg Brandlf13c4ba2005-08-02 10:28:08 +0000447- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
448
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000449- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
450
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000451- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
452
453- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
454
455- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
456
457- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
458
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000459- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
460 Closes bug #1166582.
461
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000462- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
463 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
464 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
465
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000466Mac
467---
468
469
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000470New platforms
471-------------
472
473- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
474
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000475
476Tools/Demos
477-----------
478
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000479- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
480
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000481- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000482
483
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000484What's New in Python 2.4 final?
485===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000486
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000487*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000488
489Core and builtins
490-----------------
491
492- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
493 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
494 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
495
496
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000497What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
498==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000499
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000500*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000501
502Core and builtins
503-----------------
504
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000505- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
506 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
507 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
508
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000509
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000510Library
511-------
512
513- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
514 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
515 raised is re-raised.
516
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000517- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
518 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
519
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000520- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
521 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
522 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
523 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
524 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
525 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
526 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
527 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
528 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
529 by the slice are recomputed now.
530
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000531- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000532
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000533Build
534-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000535
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000536- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
537 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
538 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000539
540C API
541-----
542
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000543- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
544
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000545
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000546What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
547================================
548
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000549*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000550
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000551License
552-------
553
554The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
555is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
556changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
557Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
558intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
559durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
560the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
561License::
562
563 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
564
565says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
566to Python 2.1.1.
567
568The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
569License Version 2.
570
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000571Core and builtins
572-----------------
573
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000574- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
575 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
576 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
577 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
578 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
579 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
580 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
581 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
582 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
583 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
584
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000585- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000586
587Extension Modules
588-----------------
589
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000590- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
591 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
592 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
593 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000594
595Library
596-------
597
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000598- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
599 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
600 returned.
601
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000602- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
603
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000604- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
605 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
606
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000607- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
608
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000609- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
610 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000611
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000612- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
613
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000614- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
615
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000616- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000617 the source code is updated and reloaded.
618
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000619Build
620-----
621
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000622- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000623
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000624What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
625================================
626
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000627*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000628
629Core and builtins
630-----------------
631
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000632- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000633 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
634
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000635- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
636 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
637 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
638 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
639
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000640- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
641 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
642
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000643- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
644 constant.
645
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000646- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
647 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
648 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
649 large), and to anomalies such as
650 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
651 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
652 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
653 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000654
655Extension modules
656-----------------
657
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000658- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
659 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000660 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
661 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
662 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000663
664Library
665-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000666
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000667- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000668 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000669 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
670 --swig-cpp.
671
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000672- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
673 it is set.
674
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000675- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000676
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000677- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
678 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
679 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
680 Closes bug #1039270.
681
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000682- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000683
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000684 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000685 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
686 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
687 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
688 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
689 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
690 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
691 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
692 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
693 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
694 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
695 + Updates to documentation.
696
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000697- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
698 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
699 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
700 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
701
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000702- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000703
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000704- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
705 applications should use the getmember function.
706
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000707- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
708
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000709- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
710 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
711 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
712 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
713 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
714 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
715 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
716 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
717 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
718
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000719- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
720 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000721 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000722
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000723- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
724 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
725 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
726 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
727 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
728 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
729 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
730 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000731
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000732- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
733 the new public features (of which there are many).
734
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000735- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000736 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
737 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
738 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
739 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000740 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000741
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000742- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
743
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000744- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
745 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
746 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
747 options.
748
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000749- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
750 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
751 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
752 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
753 conditions under which non-string values work.
754
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000755Build
756-----
757
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000758- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
759 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
760 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
761
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000762- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
763 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
764 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
765 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
766 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000767
768C API
769-----
770
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000771- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
772 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
773
774- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
775
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000776- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
777 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
778 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
779 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
780 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
781 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
782 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
783 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
784 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
785
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000786- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
787
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000788- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
789 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
790 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000791
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000792Tests
793-----
794
795- test__locale ported to unittest
796
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000797Mac
798---
799
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000800- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
801 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
802 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000803
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000804Tools/Demos
805-----------
806
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000807- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
808 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
809 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
810 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
811 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000812
813
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000814What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
815=================================
816
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000817*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000818
819Core and builtins
820-----------------
821
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000822- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000823 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
824
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000825- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
826 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
827 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
828 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
829 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
830 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
831 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
832 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000833 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
834 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
835 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
836 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
837 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000838
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000839- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
840 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
841 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
842 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
843 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
844
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000845- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
846
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000847- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
848 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
849
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000850- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
851 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
852 modified the list.
853
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000854- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
855 functions is now writable.
856
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000857- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
858 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
859 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
860 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
861
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000862- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
863 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
864 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
865 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
866 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000867
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000868- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
869 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
870
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000871Extension modules
872-----------------
873
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000874- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
875
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000876- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
877 data.
878
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000879- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
880 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
881 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
882 supposed to have been truncated away.
883
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000884- Added socket.socketpair().
885
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000886- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
887 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
888
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000889- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000890 versions of Python, have now been removed.
891
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000892Library
893-------
894
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000895- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000896 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000897
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000898- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
899 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
900
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000901- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
902 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
903
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000904- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
905
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000906- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
907 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000908
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000909- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
910 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
911
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000912- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
913
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000914- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
915
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000916- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
917
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000918- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
919 Percivall.
920
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000921- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
922 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
923
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000924- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
925 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
926 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000927 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000928
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000929- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
930 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
931 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
932 and exponent.
933
934- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
935
936- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +0000937 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000938 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
939
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000940- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
941 to the readline module.
942
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000943- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000944 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
945 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000946
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000947- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
948 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
949 contains symlinks.
950
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000951- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
952 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
953
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000954- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
955 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
956 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
957
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000958- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
959 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
960 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
961 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
962 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
963 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
964 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
965 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
966 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
967 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
968 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
969 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
970 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
971
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000972- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
973
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000974Tools/Demos
975-----------
976
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000977- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
978 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
979
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000980- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
981
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000982Build
983-----
984
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000985- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
986 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
987 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
988 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
989 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
990 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
991 plans to do so.
992
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000993- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
994 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
995
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000996- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
997 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
998
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000999- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
1000 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
1001
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +00001002- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
1003 GNU/k*BSD systems.
1004
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +00001005- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
1006 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
1007
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001008C API
1009-----
1010
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001011..
1012
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001013Documentation
1014-------------
1015
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001016- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1017 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1018
1019- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1020 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1021 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001022
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001023New platforms
1024-------------
1025
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001026- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1027
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001028Tests
1029-----
1030
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001031..
1032
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001033Windows
1034-------
1035
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001036- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1037 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1038 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1039 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1040 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1041 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1042 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1043 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1044 the problem.
1045
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001046Mac
1047---
1048
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001049..
1050
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001051
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001052What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1053=================================
1054
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001055*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001056
1057Core and builtins
1058-----------------
1059
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001060- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1061 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1062 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1063 sensitive code.
1064
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001065- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001066 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001067
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001068 @staticmethod
1069 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001070
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001071 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001072
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001073- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1074 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1075 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1076 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1077 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1078 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1079 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1080 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1081 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1082 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1083 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1084
1085 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1086 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1087 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1088 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1089 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1090 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1091 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1092
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001093- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1094 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1095
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001096- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001097 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001098
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001099- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001100 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001101 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1102
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001103- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001104 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1105 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1106
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001107- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1108 types that support garbage collection.
1109
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001110- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1111
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001112- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1113 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1114 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1115 Jython.
1116
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001117- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1118
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001119- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1120 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1121
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001122- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1123 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1124 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001125
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001126- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1127 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1128 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1129
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001130Extension modules
1131-----------------
1132
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001133- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1134
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001135Library
1136-------
1137
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001138- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1139 TIS-620
1140
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001141- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1142 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1143 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1144 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1145 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1146 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1147 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1148 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1149 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1150 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1151
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001152- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1153
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001154- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1155 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1156 same as when the argument is omitted).
1157 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1158
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001159- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1160
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001161- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1162 schemes are offered.
1163
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001164- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1165
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001166- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1167 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1168 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1169
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001170- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1171
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001172- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1173 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1174
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001175- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1176 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1177 when dummy_threading is being used.
1178
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001179- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1180 from a tarfile.
1181
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001182- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001183 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001184
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001185- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1186 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1187 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1188 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1189
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001190- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1191 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1192
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001193- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1194 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1195 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1196 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1197 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1198 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1199 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1200 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1201 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1202 by some other method in progress).
1203
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001204- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1205 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1206 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001207
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001208- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1209
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001210- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1211 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1212 AM Kuchling.
1213
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001214- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1215 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1216 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1217
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001218- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1219 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1220 instead of unsigned.
1221
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001222- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001223 no longer part of the public API.
1224
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001225- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1226 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1227 string methods of the same name).
1228
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001229- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001230 SF patch 945642.
1231
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001232- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1233
1234 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1235
1236 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1237 DocTestSuites.
1238
1239- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1240 that provide thread-local data.
1241
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001242- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1243 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1244
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001245- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1246
1247- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1248 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1249 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1250
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001251- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1252
1253 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1254 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1255 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001256
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001257 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1258 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1259 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1260 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1261
1262 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1263 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1264
1265 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1266 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1267 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1268 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1269
1270 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1271 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1272 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1273 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1274 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1275
1276 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1277 wrapping help output.
1278
1279 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1280 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1281 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001282
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001283C API
1284-----
1285
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001286- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1287 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1288 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1289 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1290 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1291 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1292 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1293 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1294 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1295 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1296 its visible semantics have not changed.
1297
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001298- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1299 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1300
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001301Documentation
1302-------------
1303
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001304- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001305
1306 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001307 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001308
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001309 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001310
1311 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1312
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001313- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001314
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001315Tests
1316-----
1317
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001318- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001319 platforms that use the Makefile.
1320
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001321- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1322 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1323 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1324
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001325
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001326What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1327=================================
1328
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001329*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001330
1331Core and builtins
1332-----------------
1333
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001334- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1335 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1336 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1337 objects now (one object instead of three).
1338
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001339- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1340 Windows DLLs.
1341
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001342- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1343 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001344
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001345- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1346 a new .pyc magic.
1347
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001348- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1349 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1350 be there.
1351
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001352- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1353 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1354 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1355
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001356- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1357 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1358 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1359
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001360- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1361
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001362- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1363 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1364 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001365
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001366- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1367 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1368
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001369- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1370
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001371- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001372 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001373
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001374- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1375
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001376- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1377
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001378- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1379 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1380
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001381- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1382 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1383 Fixes bug #858016 .
1384
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001385- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1386 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1387 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1388
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001389- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1390 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1391 improves their performance (about 35%).
1392
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001393- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1394 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1395 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1396
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001397- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1398 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1399 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1400 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1401
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001402- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1403 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001404 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001405 length is not known).
1406
1407- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1408 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001409 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1410 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001411 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1412
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001413- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1414 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1415
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001416- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1417 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1418 keyword arguments.
1419
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001420- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1421 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1422 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1423
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001424- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1425 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1426 cases.
1427
1428- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1429 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1430 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1431 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1432 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1433 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1434 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1435 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1436 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1437 a release build.
1438
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001439- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1440 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1441
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001442- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001443 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001444
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001445- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1446 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1447 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1448 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1449 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1450 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1451 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1452 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1453 destroyed.
1454
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001455- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1456 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1457 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1458 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1459 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1460 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1461 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1462 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1463
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001464- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1465 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1466 character other than a space.
1467
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001468- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1469 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1470 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1471 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1472 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1473 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1474 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1475 attributes with the same name.
1476
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001477- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1478 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1479 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1480 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1481 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1482 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1483 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1484 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1485 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1486 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1487 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1488 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1489 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1490 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001491
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001492- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1493 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1494 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1495 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1496 This has been repaired.
1497
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001498- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1499
1500- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1501
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001502- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1503 over a sequence.
1504
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001505- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001506 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001507
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001508- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1509
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001510- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1511 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1512 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1513 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1514 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1515 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1516 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1517 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1518
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001519- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1520 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1521 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1522
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001523- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1524 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1525 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1526 freelist.
1527
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001528- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1529 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1530
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001531- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1532 number.
1533
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001534- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1535 a TypeError exception.
1536
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001537- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1538 820195.
1539
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001540- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1541 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1542 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1543
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001544- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001545 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1546 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001547
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001548- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1549 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1550 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1551
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001552- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1553 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001554 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001555
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001556- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001557 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1558 the first call.
1559
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001560
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001561Extension modules
1562-----------------
1563
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001564- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1565 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1566
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001567- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1568 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1569 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1570 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1571 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1572 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1573 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001574
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001575- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1576
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001577- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1578
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001579- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1580 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1581
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001582- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1583 fewer false positives.
1584
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001585- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1586 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1587
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001588- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001589 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1590
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001591- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001592 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001593 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001594 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1595 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001596
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001597- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1598 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1599 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1600 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1601
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001602- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1603 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1604 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1605 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1606 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1607 #897625.
1608
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001609- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1610 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1611
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001612- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1613 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1614 and pops on either side of the deque.
1615
1616- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1617 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1618
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001619- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1620 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1621 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1622 other functions that expect a function argument.
1623
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001624- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1625
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001626- os.getsid was added.
1627
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001628- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1629 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1630 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1631
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001632- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1633
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001634- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1635
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001636- readline.clear_history was added.
1637
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001638- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1639
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001640- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1641
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001642- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1643
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001644- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1645
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001646- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1647
1648- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1649
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001650- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1651
1652- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1653
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001654- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1655 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1656 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1657
1658- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1659 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1660 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1661 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1662 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1663 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1664 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1665
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001666- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1667 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1668 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1669 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001670
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001671- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001672 iterators from a single iterable.
1673
1674- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1675 of raising a TypeError exception.
1676
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001677- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1678 as parameter.
1679
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001680Library
1681-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001682
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001683- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1684 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1685 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001686
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001687- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1688 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1689 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001690
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001691- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001692
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001693- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1694 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001695
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001696- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1697 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1698
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001699- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1700
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001701- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001702 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001703
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001704- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001705 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001706
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001707- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1708
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001709- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1710 on cygwin and mingw32.
1711
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001712- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1713
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001714- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1715 module.
1716
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001717- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1718 installation scheme for all platforms.
1719
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001720- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001721 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001722
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001723- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1724 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1725 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1726
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001727- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1728 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1729 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1730
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001731- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1732
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001733- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1734
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001735- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1736 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1737
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001738- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1739 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1740 type pattern with the same value exists.
1741
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001742- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1743 when run from the command prompt).
1744
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001745- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1746 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1747
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001748- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1749 default sort).
1750
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001751- Added global runctx function to profile module
1752
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001753- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1754
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001755- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1756
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001757- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1758
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001759- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001760 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1761 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1762 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1763 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1764 accordingly.
1765
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001766- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1767 decoding standards.
1768
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001769- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1770 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1771 called for all requests.
1772
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001773- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1774 they are passed to the compiler.
1775
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001776- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1777 indent, width and depth.
1778
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001779- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1780 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1781
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001782- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1783 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1784
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001785- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1786
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001787- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1788
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001789- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1790
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001791- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1792 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1793
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001794- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001795 for better performance.
1796
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001797- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001798
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001799- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1800 a string).
1801
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001802- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1803
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001804- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1805
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001806- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1807
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001808- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1809
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001810- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1811 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1812 list of fieldnames.
1813
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001814- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1815 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1816
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001817- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1818
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001819- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1820 empty lists.
1821
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001822- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1823 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1824 and shelves.
1825
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001826- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1827 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1828
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001829- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001830 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1831 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001832
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001833- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1834 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001835 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001836
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001837- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001838 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1839 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1840
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001841- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1842 and removed in Py2.4.
1843
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001844- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1845
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001846- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1847
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001848Tools/Demos
1849-----------
1850
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001851- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1852 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1853
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001854- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1855
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001856- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1857 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1858 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1859 destination in situations where both files are given.
1860
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001861- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1862 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1863 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1864 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1865
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001866- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1867
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001868- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1869 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1870 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1871 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1872 now.
1873
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001874- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1875 in effect
1876
1877- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1878 C-c C-h
1879
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001880- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1881 -d option was given.
1882
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001883Build
1884-----
1885
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001886- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1887 build under OS X.
1888
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001889- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1890 --enable-profiling.
1891
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001892- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1893 is configured --with-tsc.
1894
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001895- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1896 on AMD64.
1897
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001898- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1899 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1900
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001901- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1902 removed.
1903
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001904- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1905 supported (see PEP 11).
1906
1907- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1908
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001909- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1910
1911- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1912 (see PEP 11).
1913
1914- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1915 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1916
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001917C API
1918-----
1919
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001920- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1921 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1922 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1923
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001924- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1925 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1926 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1927 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1928
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001929- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1930 generator objects.
1931
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001932- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1933 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001934 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1935 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001936
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001937- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1938 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1939
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001940- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1941 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1942 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1943 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1944 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1945
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001946- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1947 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1948 about 10% faster.
1949
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001950- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1951 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1952
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001953- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1954 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1955 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1956 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1957
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001958Windows
1959-------
1960
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001961- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1962 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1963 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1964 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1965
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001966- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1967 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1968 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1969
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001970
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001971What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1972===============================
1973
1974*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1975
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001976IDLE
1977----
1978
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001979- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1980 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1981 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1982 context-menu actions.
1983
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001984- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1985 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1986 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1987 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1988 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1989 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1990 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1991 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1992 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1993
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001994
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001995What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1996=============================================
1997
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001998*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001999
2000Core and builtins
2001-----------------
2002
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002003- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002004 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002005 comment at the end are still unsupported.
2006
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002007Extension modules
2008-----------------
2009
2010- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
2011 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
2012 than once. This has been fixed.
2013
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002014- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2015 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2016 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2017 call.
2018
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002019- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2020
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002021Library
2022-------
2023
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002024- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2025 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2026
2027- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2028 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2029 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2030 restored.
2031
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002032IDLE
2033----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002034
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002035- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002036
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002037Build
2038-----
2039
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002040- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2041 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2042
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002043C API
2044-----
2045
2046Windows
2047-------
2048
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002049- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2050 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2051
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002052- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2053
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002054Mac
2055---
2056
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002057- Various fixes to pimp.
2058
2059- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2060
2061- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2062 more problems than it solves.
2063
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002064
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002065What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2066=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002067
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002068*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2069
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002070Core and builtins
2071-----------------
2072
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002073- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2074 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2075
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002076- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2077 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002078 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002079
2080- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2081 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2082 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002083 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002084
2085- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2086 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002087
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002088- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2089 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2090 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2091
2092- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002093 770247.
2094
2095- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002096
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002097Extension modules
2098-----------------
2099
2100- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2101 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2102
2103- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2104
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002105- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2106
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002107- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2108 contained within the _strptime module.
2109
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002110- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2111 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2112
2113- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002114 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2115
2116- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2117 the find_class attribute, if present.
2118
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002119- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002120
2121 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2122 (SF bug 763298).
2123
2124 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002125 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2126 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2127 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002128
2129 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2130
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002131Library
2132-------
2133
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002134- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2135
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002136- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2137 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2138 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2139 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2140 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2141 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2142 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2143 or Tester().
2144
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002145- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2146 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2147 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2148 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2149 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2150 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2151 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2152 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2153 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002154
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002155 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002156
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002157- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2158 weren't before was an oversight.
2159
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002160- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2161 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2162
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002163- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2164 when there are no lines.
2165
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002166- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2167 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2168
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002169- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2170 to child processes.
2171
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002172- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2173
2174- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2175
2176- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2177 xmlrpclib.
2178
2179- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2180 responses.
2181
2182- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2183 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2184
2185- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2186 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2187 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2188
2189- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2190 used as patterns.
2191
2192- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2193 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2194 than Tk 8.3.
2195
2196- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2197
2198- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002199
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002200Tools/Demos
2201-----------
2202
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002203- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2204
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002205- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2206
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002207- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002208
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002209Build
2210-----
2211
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002212- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2213
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002214- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2215
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002216- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2217 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002218
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002219- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2220 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2221 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002222
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002223C API
2224-----
2225
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002226- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2227 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2228
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002229Windows
2230-------
2231
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002232- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2233 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2234 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2235 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2236 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2237 Python exception ::
2238
2239 thread.error: can't start new thread
2240
2241 is raised now.
2242
2243- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2244 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2245 instead of from DLL teardown.
2246
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002247Mac
2248---
2249
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002250- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002251 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002252 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2253 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2254 the executable in the bundle.
2255
2256- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002257
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002258- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2259
2260- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2261 on Panther.
2262
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002263What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2264================================
2265
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002266*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002267
2268Core and builtins
2269-----------------
2270
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002271- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2272 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2273 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2274 with the -i option.
2275
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002276- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2277 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2278
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002279- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2280 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2281
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002282- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2283 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2284 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2285 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2286 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2287 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2288 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2289 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2290 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2291 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2292 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2293 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2294 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002295
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002296- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2297 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2298 embedded in a lambda expression.
2299
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002300- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2301 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2302 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2303 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2304 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2305
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002306- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2307 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2308 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2309
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002310- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2311 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2312
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002313- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2314 It's writable again.
2315
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002316- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2317 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2318 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002319 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002320
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002321- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2322 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2323 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2324
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002325Extension modules
2326-----------------
2327
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002328- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2329 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2330
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002331- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2332 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2333 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2334 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2335
2336- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2337 collection.
2338
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002339- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2340 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2341 unique within a single program run.
2342
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002343- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2344 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2345
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002346- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2347 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2348
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002349- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2350 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002351
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002352- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2353
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002354- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2355 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2356
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002357- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2358 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2359 for many BSD-derived systems.
2360
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002361
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002362Library
2363-------
2364
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002365- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2366 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2367 primary ones:
2368
2369 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2370 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2371 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2372
2373 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2374 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2375 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2376 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2377 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2378 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2379
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002380- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2381 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2382 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2383 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2384 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2385 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2386 argument.
2387
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002388- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2389 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2390 in the archive.
2391
2392- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2393 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2394
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002395- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2396 569574).
2397
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002398- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2399 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2400 no more.
2401
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002402- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2403 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2404 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2405 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2406 code coverage.
2407
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002408- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2409 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2410 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002411 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2412 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002413
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002414- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2415 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2416 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002417 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002418
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002419- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2420
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002421- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2422 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2423 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2424 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2425
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002426- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2427 handling.
2428
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002429- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2430 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2431
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002432- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2433 in socket.py.
2434
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002435- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2436
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002437- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2438 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2439 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2440 opener with proxy support.
2441
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002442- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2443
2444- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2445
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002446Tools/Demos
2447-----------
2448
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002449- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2450
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002451- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2452
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002453- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2454 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002455
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002456- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2457 files.
2458
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002459Build
2460-----
2461
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002462- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002463 different root directory.
2464
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002465C API
2466-----
2467
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002468- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2469 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2470 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2471 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2472 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2473 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2474 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2475 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2476 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2477 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2478
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002479- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2480 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2481 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2482 from Python.
2483
2484
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002485New platforms
2486-------------
2487
2488None this time.
2489
2490Tests
2491-----
2492
2493- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2494 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2495
2496Windows
2497-------
2498
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002499- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2500
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002501- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2502 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2503 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2504 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2505 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2506 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2507 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2508 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2509 that's what it's for.
2510
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002511Mac
2512---
2513
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002514- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2515 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2516 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2517 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002518- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2519 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2520- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002521
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002522SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2523------------------------------------
2524
2525430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2526598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2527622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2528661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2529683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2530697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2531713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2532724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2533727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2534729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2535730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2536731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2537732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2538733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2539735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2540740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2541744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2542745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2543747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2544749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2545751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2546753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2547755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2548757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2549760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2550
2551
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002552What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2553================================
2554
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002555*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002556
2557Core and builtins
2558-----------------
2559
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002560- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2561 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2562
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002563- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2564 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2565 and cannot be strings).
2566
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002567- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2568 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2569 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2570 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2571
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002572- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2573 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2574 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2575 Python itself.
2576
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002577- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2578 the referenced object, if it has one.
2579
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002580- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2581 the thread started at
2582 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2583
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002584- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2585 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2586 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2587 placed on a list index.
2588
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002589- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2590 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2591 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2592 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2593
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002594- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2595 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2596 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2597 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2598 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2599 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2600 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2601
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002602- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2603 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2604 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2605 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2606 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2607
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002608- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2609 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002610
2611- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2612 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2613 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2614 #693195.)
2615
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002616- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2617 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002618
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002619- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002620 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002621 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2622 interpreter executions, would fail.
2623
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002624- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002625 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002626 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002627
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002628Extension modules
2629-----------------
2630
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002631- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2632 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2633 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2634 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2635
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002636- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2637 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2638
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002639- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2640 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2641 and Greg Chapman.)
2642
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002643- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2644 recursively.
2645
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002646- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002647 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2648 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2649 leaks.
2650
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002651- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2652
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002653- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2654 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2655 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2656 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2657 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2658 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2659 #705836.
2660
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002661- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002662 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2663
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002664- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2665 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2666 See SF bug #692416.
2667
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002668- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2669 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2670
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002671- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2672 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2673 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002674
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002675- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002676 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2677 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2678
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002679- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2680 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2681 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2682 timeouts to work properly.
2683
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002684Library
2685-------
2686
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002687- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2688 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2689 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2690 future release.
2691
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002692- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2693 for querying platform dependent features.
2694
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002695- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002696
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002697- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2698 pickle protocol versions.
2699
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002700- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2701 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2702 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2703
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002704- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2705
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002706- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2707 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2708 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2709 modules.
2710
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002711- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2712 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2713 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2714
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002715- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2716 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2717
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002718- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2719 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2720 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2721
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002722- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002723 MS Office extensions.
2724
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002725- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2726 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2727
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002728- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2729 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2730
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002731- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2732 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2733 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2734 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2735 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2736 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2737
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002738- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2739 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2740 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002741
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002742- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2743 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2744 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2745
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002746- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2747
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002748- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2749 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2750 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2751
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002752Tools/Demos
2753-----------
2754
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002755- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2756 See the module docstring for details.
2757
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002758Build
2759-----
2760
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002761- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2762 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002763
2764C API
2765-----
2766
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002767- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2768
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002769- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2770 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2771 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2772
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002773- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2774 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002775
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002776 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2777 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2778 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002779
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002780- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002781 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2782
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002783- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2784 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2785 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002786
2787New platforms
2788-------------
2789
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002790None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002791
2792Tests
2793-----
2794
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002795- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2796 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002797
2798Windows
2799-------
2800
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002801- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2802 function.
2803
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002804- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2805 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002806
2807Mac
2808---
2809
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002810- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2811 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002812
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002813- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2814 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002815
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002816- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2817 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2818 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002819
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002820- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002821 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2822 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002823
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002824- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2825 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002826
2827
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002828What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2829=================================
2830
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002831*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002832
2833Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002834-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002835
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002836- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2837 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2838 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2839
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002840- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2841 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2842 (SF patch #664376.)
2843
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002844- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2845 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2846 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2847 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2848 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2849 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002850 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002851
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002852- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2853 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2854 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2855 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002856 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002857
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002858- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2859 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2860 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2861 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2862 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2863 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2864 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2865 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2866 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2867 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2868 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2869
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002870- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2871 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2872 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2873 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2874 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2875 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2876
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002877- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2878 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2879
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002880- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2881 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2882 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2883 case.)
2884
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002885- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2886 passed as unicode strings.
2887
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002888- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2889 See SF bug #683467.
2890
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002891- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2892 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2893
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002894- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2895
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002896- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2897
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002898- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2899 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2900 arguments.
2901
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002902- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2903 See SF bug #667147.
2904
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002905- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002906 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002907 See SF bug #676155.
2908
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002909- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002910 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002911 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2912 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2913 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2914 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2915 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2916 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002917
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002918Extension modules
2919-----------------
2920
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002921- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2922 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2923 tp_as_number pointer.
2924
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002925- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2926 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2927 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2928 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2929 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2930
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002931- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2932
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002933- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2934
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002935- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002936 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002937 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2938 patch #678531.)
2939
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002940- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2941 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2942
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002943- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2944 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2945
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002946- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2947
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002948- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2949 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2950 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2951
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002952- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2953
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002954- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2955 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2956
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002957- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002958
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002959- datetime changes:
2960
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002961 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2962
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002963 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2964 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2965 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2966 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2967 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2968 now.
2969
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002970 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002971 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2972 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002973
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002974 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002975 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002976 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2977 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2978 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2979 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002980
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002981 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2982 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2983 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002984 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2985
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002986 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2987 by a later example coded by Guido.
2988
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002989 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002990 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2991 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2992 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002993 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2994 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2995
2996 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2997 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2998 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2999 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
3000 tzinfo subclass instance.
3001
3002 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
3003 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
3004 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
3005 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
3006 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
3007 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
3008 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
3009 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003010
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003011 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
3012 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3013 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3014 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3015 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003016 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3017
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003018 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003019
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003020 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3021 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3022 as a naive datetime object.
3023
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003024 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3025 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3026 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3027
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003028 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3029 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3030 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3031 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3032 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3033 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3034 comparison.
3035
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003036 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3037 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3038 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3039 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003040 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003041
3042 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003043
3044 and ::
3045
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003046 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3047
3048 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3049 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3050 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3051 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3052
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003053 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3054 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3055 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3056 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3057 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3058
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003059 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3060 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003061 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3062 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003063
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003064Library
3065-------
3066
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003067- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3068 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3069
3070- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3071 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3072 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3073 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3074 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3075 See PEP 307 for details.
3076
3077- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3078 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3079
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003080- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3081 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003082 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003083 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3084 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003085 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003086
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003087- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3088 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3089
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003090- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3091 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3092 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3093
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003094- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3095
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003096- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3097 exception.
3098
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003099- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3100 class.
3101
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003102- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3103 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3104 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3105
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003106- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3107 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3108
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003109- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003110 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3111 See SF bug #659228.
3112
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003113- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3114 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3115 See SF patch #651082.
3116
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003117- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003118
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003119- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3120 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3121
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003122- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003123 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003124
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003125- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3126 DOS paths from other platforms.
3127
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003128Tools/Demos
3129-----------
3130
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003131- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3132 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3133 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3134 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3135 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3136 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3137 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3138 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3139 example:
3140
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003141 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3142 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003143
3144 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3145
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003146
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003147Build
3148-----
3149
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003150- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3151 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3152 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003153 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3154
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003155 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3156
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003157- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3158 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3159 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3160 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3161 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3162 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3163 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3164 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3165 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3166
3167- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3168 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3169 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3170 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3171
3172- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3173 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3174
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003175C API
3176-----
3177
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003178- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3179 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003180
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003181- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3182 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3183 tp_as_number pointer.
3184
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003185- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3186 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3187 (SF #681367)
3188
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003189- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3190 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3191 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3192 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003193
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003194Tests
3195-----
3196
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003197- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003198 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3199 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3200 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3201 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3202 pydoc.)
3203
3204- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3205
3206- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003207
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003208Windows
3209-------
3210
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003211- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3212 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3213 time).
3214
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003215- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3216 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3217
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003218- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3219 release without strong cryptography.
3220
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003221- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003222 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003223
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003224- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3225 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3226
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003227Mac
3228---
3229
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003230- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3231 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003232
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003233- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3234 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3235 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003236
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003237- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3238 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003239
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003240- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3241 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3242 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3243 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003244
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003245- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003246 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3247 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3248 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003249
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003250
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003251What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003252=================================
3253
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003254*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003255
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003256Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003257--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003258
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003259- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3260
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003261- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3262 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003263 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003264 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003265 a different meaning than before.
3266
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003267- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003268 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003269 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003270
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003271- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003272 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003273 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003274
3275- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3276 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3277 and deallocation.
3278
3279- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3280 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3281
3282- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3283 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3284 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3285 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3286 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3287
3288- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3289 now detected by the garbage collector.
3290
3291- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3292 [SF bug 519621]
3293
3294- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3295 identifier.
3296
3297- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3298 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3299 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3300 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3301 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3302 [SF bug 563060]
3303
3304- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3305 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3306 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3307 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3308 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3309
3310- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3311 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3312 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3313
3314- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3315
3316- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3317 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3318 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3319 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3320 state of the slots would be lost.)
3321
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003322Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003323-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003324
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003325- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003326 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3327 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3328 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3329 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003330 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3331 Jython 2.1.
3332
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003333- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003334 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003335 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3336 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3337 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3338 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3339 these, see PEP 302.
3340
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003341- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3342 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3343 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3344
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003345- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3346 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3347 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3348
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003349- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3350 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3351 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3352
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003353- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3354 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3355 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3356 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3357 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3358 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3359 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3360 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3361 releases or implementations.
3362
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003363- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003364 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3365 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003366
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003367- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3368 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3369
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003370- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3371 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3372 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3373
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003374- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3375 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3376
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003377- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3378 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003379 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3380 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003381
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003382- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3383 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3384 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3385 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3386 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3387
3388 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3389 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3390 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3391 pattern.
3392
3393 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3394 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3395 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3396 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3397
3398 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3399 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3400 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3401 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3402 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3403 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3404
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003405- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3406 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3407 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3408 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3409 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3410 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3411 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3412 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003413
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003414- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3415 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3416 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3417 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3418 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003419 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3420 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3421 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3422 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3423 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3424 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3425 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003426
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003427- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3428 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3429
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003430- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3431 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3432 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3433 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3434 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3435 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3436 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3437 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3438 to Zack Weinberg!
3439
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003440- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3441 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3442 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3443 type. This has been fixed now.
3444
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003445- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3446 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3447 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3448
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003449- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3450 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3451 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3452 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3453 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3454 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3455 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3456 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003457 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003458
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003459- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3460 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3461 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003462
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003463- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3464 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3465 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3466 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3467 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3468 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3469 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3470 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003471 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003472 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3473 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3474
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003475- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3476 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3477 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3478 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3479 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3480 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3481 this.)
3482
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003483- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3484 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003485 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003486 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003487 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3488 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003489 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3490 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003491
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003492- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3493 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3494 currently running.
3495
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003496- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3497 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3498 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3499 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3500
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003501- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3502 as directory names.
3503
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003504- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3505 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3506
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003507- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3508 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3509
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003510- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003511 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3512 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003513
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003514- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3515 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3516 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3517 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3518 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3519
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003520- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3521 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3522 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3523 removed.
3524
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003525- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3526 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3527 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3528
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003529- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3530 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3531 to __debug__.
3532
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003533- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3534 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3535 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3536
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003537- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3538 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3539 deprecated now.
3540
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003541- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3542 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3543 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003544
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003545- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3546 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3547 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3548 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3549 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003550
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003551- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3552 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3553
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003554- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3555 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3556 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003557 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003558 is backward compatible.
3559
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003560- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3561 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3562 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3563 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3564 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3565
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003566- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3567 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3568 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3569 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3570 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3571 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003572
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003573- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3574 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3575
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003576- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3577 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3578
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003579- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3580 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3581 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3582 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3583 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3584
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003585- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3586 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3587 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3588
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003589- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003590 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3591
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003592- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3593 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3594 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003595
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003596- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3597 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3598
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003599- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3600 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3601 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3602
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003603- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3604
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003605Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003606-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003607
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003608- Added three operators to the operator module:
3609 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3610 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3611 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3612
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003613- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3614
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003615- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3616 archives.
3617
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003618- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3619 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3620 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3621
3622 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3623
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003624- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3625 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3626 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003627 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003628
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003629- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3630 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3631 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3632 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003633 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3634 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3635 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3636 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003637
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003638- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3639 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003640
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003641- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3642
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003643- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3644 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3645
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003646- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3647 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3648 supported.
3649
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003650- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3651
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003652- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3653 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003654
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003655- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3656 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3657
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003658- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3659
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003660- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3661 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3662
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003663- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3664 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3665 functions but callable type objects.
3666
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003667- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003668 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003669 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003670
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003671- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3672 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003673
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003674- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3675 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003676
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003677- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3678 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3679 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3680 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3681
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003682- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3683 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003684
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003685- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3686 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3687 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3688 and __imul__.
3689
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003690- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003691 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3692 is called.
3693
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003694- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3695 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3696 interpreter was compiled.
3697
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003698- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3699 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3700 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003701 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003702 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3703 1, not 2.
3704
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003705- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3706 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3707 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3708 limit.
3709
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003710- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3711 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3712 bug #623464.
3713
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003714- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3715 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3716 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3717 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3718
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003719Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003720-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003721
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003722- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3723
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003724- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3725 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3726 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3727 with Python 2.3a2.
3728
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003729- os.path exposes getctime.
3730
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003731- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003732 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003733 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003734 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003735 unit tests of floating point results.
3736
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003737- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3738 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3739 has been increased.
3740
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003741- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3742 executed.
3743
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003744- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3745 postinstallation script.
3746
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003747- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3748 test the current module.
3749
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003750- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003751 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3752 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3753 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3754 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3755
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003756- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003757 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003758 Ward's Optik package.
3759
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003760- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3761 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3762 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3763 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3764
3765- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3766 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003767 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003768
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003769- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3770 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3771 shelf are binary pickles.
3772
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003773- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3774 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3775
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003776- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3777 modules are iterators now.
3778
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003779- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3780 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3781 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3782 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3783 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3784 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003785
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003786- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3787 with their entity value.
3788
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003789- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3790
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003791- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3792 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003793
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003794- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3795 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003796 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003797
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003798- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3799 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3800 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3801 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3802 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3803 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3804 main():
3805
3806 import locale
3807 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3808
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003809- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3810 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3811
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003812- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3813 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3814 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3815 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3816 to the new standard.
3817
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003818- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3819 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3820 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3821 an extension to the database.
3822
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003823- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3824 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3825 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3826 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003827 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003828
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003829- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003830 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003831
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003832- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3833 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3834 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3835 bounded integers.
3836
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003837- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3838 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3839 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3840 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3841 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3842 in existence.
3843
3844 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3845 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3846 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3847 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3848 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3849 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3850
3851 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3852 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3853 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3854 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3855
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003856- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3857 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3858 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3859
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003860- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3861
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003862- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3863 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3864 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3865 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3866
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003867- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3868 argument.
3869
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003870- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3871 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3872 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3873 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3874 [SF patch 560794].
3875
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003876- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3877 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3878 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003879 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3880 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3881 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003882
3883- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3884 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003885
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003886- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3887 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3888 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3889 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003890
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003891- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3892 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3893 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3894 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3895 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3896
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003897- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003898
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003899- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3900
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003901- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3902 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3903 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3904 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3905 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3906 identical to None.
3907
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003908- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3909 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3910 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3911 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3912 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3913 results now.
3914
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003915- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3916 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3917
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003918- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3919 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3920 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3921 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3922 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3923 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3924 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3925 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3926
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003927- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3928
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003929- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3930 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3931
3932- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3933 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3934 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3935 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3936 and other systems.
3937
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003938- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3939 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3940 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3941 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 +00003942 work well with these.
3943
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003944- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3945
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003946- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003947 connections.
3948
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003949- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3950 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3951 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3952
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003953- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3954 sets
3955
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003956- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3957 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3958 name.
3959
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003960- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3961 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3962 passed in.
3963
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003964- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003965 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003966 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3967 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003968
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003969- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3970
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003971- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3972
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003973- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3974 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3975 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3976
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003977- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3978 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3979 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3980 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003981 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003982
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003983- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003984 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003985 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003986
3987- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3988 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3989 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3990
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003991- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003992 the value of its expression argument.
3993
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003994- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3995 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3996 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3997
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003998- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3999 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
4000 skipstone browser was included.
4001
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00004002- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
4003 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
4004
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004005Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004006-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004007
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00004008- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
4009 names in addition to accepting file names.
4010
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00004011- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
4012 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4013 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4014 still used and useful.)
4015
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004016- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4017 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4018 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4019 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004020
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004021- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4022 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4023 the generated binary.
4024
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004025Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004026-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004027
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004028- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4029
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004030- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4031 except in the hands of experts.
4032
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004033- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004034 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4035 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4036 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004037
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004038- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4039 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4040 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4041 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4042 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4043 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4044 builds.
4045
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004046- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4047 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4048 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4049 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4050 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4051 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4052 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4053 new type.
4054
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004055- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004056
4057 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4058 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4059 positive infinities.
4060
4061 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4062 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4063 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4064 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4065 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4066 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4067 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4068
4069 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4070
4071 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4072
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004073- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4074 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4075 size of the executable.
4076
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004077- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4078 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4079 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4080 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004081
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004082- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4083
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004084- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4085 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4086 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004087
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004088- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4089 well as Unix.
4090
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004091- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4092 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4093 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4094 modules in the README file for details.
4095
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004096C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004097-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004098
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004099- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4100 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004101 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004102 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004103 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004104
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004105- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4106 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4107 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4108 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4109 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4110 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004111 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004112 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4113 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4114 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4115 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4116 aligned.)
4117
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004118- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4119 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4120 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4121
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004122- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4123 level.
4124
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004125- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4126 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4127 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4128 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4129 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4130
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004131- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4132 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4133 code.
4134
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004135- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4136 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4137 adjusting for negative indices.
4138
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004139- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4140 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4141 object.
4142
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004143- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4144 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4145 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4146
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004147- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4148 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004149
4150- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4151
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004152- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4153 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4154 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4155 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4156
4157- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4158
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004159- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004160
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004161- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004162 without going through the buffer API.
4163
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004164- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004165
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004166- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4167 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4168 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4169 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4170
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004171- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4172 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4173
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004174- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004175 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4176
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004177New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004178-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004179
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004180- OpenVMS is now supported.
4181
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004182- AtheOS is now supported.
4183
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004184- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4185
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004186- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4187
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004188Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004189-----
4190
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004191- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4192 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4193 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004194
4195Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004196-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004197
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004198- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4199 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4200 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4201 bugs.
4202 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004203 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004204 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4205 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004206 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004207
4208- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004209 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004210
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004211- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4212 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4213
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004214- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4215 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004216 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004217 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4218
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004219- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4220 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4221 use files" uninstall option).
4222
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004223- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4224
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004225- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4226 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4227
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004228- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4229 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4230 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4231
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004232- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4233 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4234 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4235 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4236 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004237 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4238 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4239 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004240
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004241- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004242 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004243 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4244 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4245 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4246 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4247 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4248 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4249 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4250 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4251 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4252 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4253 work around.
4254
4255- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4256 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4257 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4258 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4259 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4260 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4261 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4262 specified with O_CREAT too).
4263
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004264Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004265----
4266
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004267- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004268
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004269- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4270 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4271 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4272
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004273- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4274 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4275 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4276
4277- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4278 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4279 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4280 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4281 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4282 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4283 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4284 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004285
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004286- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4287 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4288 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004289
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004290- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4291 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4292 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4293 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4294 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004295
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004296- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4297 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4298 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004299
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004300- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4301 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004302
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004303- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4304 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4305 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4306 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4307 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004308
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004309- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4310 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4311 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4312
4313- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4314 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4315 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004316
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004317- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4318 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4319 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4320 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004321 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004322
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004323- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4324 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004325
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004326- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4327 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004328
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004329- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004330 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004331 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4332 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004333
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004334
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004335What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004336===============================
4337
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004338*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4339
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004340Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004341--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004342
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004343- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4344 with a custom metaclass.
4345
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004346Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004347-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004348
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004349- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4350 are proxies.
4351
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004352Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004353-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004354
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004355- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4356 very short strings.
4357
4358- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4359 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4360 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4361 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4362 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4363
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004364Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004365-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004366
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004367- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4368 close or delete time).
4369
4370- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4371 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4372
4373- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4374
4375- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004376 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004377
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004378Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004379-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004380
4381Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004382-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004383
4384C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004385-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004386
4387New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004388-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004389
4390Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004391-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004392
4393Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004394-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004395
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004396- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4397
4398- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4399 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4400
4401- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4402 deleted at process exit time.
4403
4404- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4405 in backslash.
4406
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004407Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004408----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004409
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004410- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4411 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4412 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4413
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004414
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004415What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004416===========================
4417
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004418*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4419
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004420Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004421--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004422
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004423- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4424 been extensively updated. See
4425
4426 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4427
4428 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4429
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004430- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4431 deleted!
4432
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004433- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4434 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4435 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4436 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4437 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4438
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004439- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4440
4441 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4442 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4443
4444 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4445 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4446 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4447 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4448 supported anyway.
4449
4450 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4451 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4452
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004453- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4454 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4455 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4456 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4457 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004458
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004459- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4460 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4461 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4462
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004463Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004464-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004465
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004466- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4467 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4468 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4469 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4470 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4471 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004472 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4473 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4474 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4475 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004476
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004477- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4478 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4479 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4480
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004481Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004482-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004483
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004484- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4485
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004486Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004487-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004488
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004489- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4490 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4491 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4492 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4493 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4494 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4495
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004496- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4497
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004498- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4499
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004500- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4501
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004502- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4503 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4504 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4505
4506- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4507
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004508Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004509-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004510
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004511- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4512 off a search on Google.
4513
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004514Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004515-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004516
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004517- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4518 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4519 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4520 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4521 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4522 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4523 other platforms should do likewise.
4524
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004525- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4526 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4527 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4528
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004529C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004530-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004531
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004532- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4533 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4534 producing key-value pairs.
4535
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004536- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004537 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004538 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4539 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4540 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4541 previously went unchallenged.
4542
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004543New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004544-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004545
4546Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004547-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004548
4549Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004550-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004551
4552Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004553----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004554
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004555- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4556 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004557
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004558- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4559 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4560 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4561 home.
4562
4563
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004564What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004565===========================
4566
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004567*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4568
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004569Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004570--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004571
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004572- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4573 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004574
4575 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004576 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004577
4578 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4579 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004580 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004581 This needs to be documented.
4582
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004583- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4584 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4585
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004586- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4587 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4588 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4589
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004590- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4591 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4592
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004593- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4594 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4595 class forbids it).
4596
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004597- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4598 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4599 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4600
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004601- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4602
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004603Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004604-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004605
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004606- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4607 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004608 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004609
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004610- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4611 (like 1 + '').
4612
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004613Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004614-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004615
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004616- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4617 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4618 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4619 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004620 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004621 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4622
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004623- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4624 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4625 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4626 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4627
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004628- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4629 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004630 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4631 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4632 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004633
4634- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4635 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004636
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004637- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4638 bytes on its input.
4639
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004640Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004641-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004642
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004643- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004644 convenience function.
4645
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004646- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4647 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4648 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004649 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4650 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4651 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4652 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4653 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4654 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004655
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004656- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4657 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4658 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4659 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4660
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004661- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4662 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4663 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4664
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004665- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4666 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4667 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4668 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4669
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004670- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4671 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004672 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004673 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4674 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4675 new -l and -e options.
4676
4677- statcache is now deprecated.
4678
4679- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4680 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004681 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004682 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4683 time properly taken into account.
4684
4685- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4686 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4687 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4688 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4689
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004690Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004691-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004692
4693Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004694-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004695
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004696- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4697 is built with libdb3 if available.
4698
4699- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4700
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004701C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004702-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004703
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004704- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4705 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4706 PySequence_Size().
4707
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004708- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4709
4710- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4711 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4712 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4713
4714- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4715 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4716
4717- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4718 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4719
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004720New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004721-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004722
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004723- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4724 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4725
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004726- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4727 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4728
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004729- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4730
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004731Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004732-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004733
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004734- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4735 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4736
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004737Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004738-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004739
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004740Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004741----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004742
4743- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4744 removed completely in the next release.
4745
4746- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4747 OSX.
4748
4749- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4750 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4751
4752- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4753
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004754
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004755What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004756===========================
4757
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004758*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4759
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004760Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004761--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004762
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004763- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004764 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004765 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004766 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4767 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004768 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4769 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004770 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4771 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004772
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004773- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4774 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4775
4776- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4777 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4778
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004779Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004780-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004781
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004782- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4783 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4784 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4785 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4786 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4787 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4788 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4789 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4790
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004791- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4792 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4793 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4794 example).
4795
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004796- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004797 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004798 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004799 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004800
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004801- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4802 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4803 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004804 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004805
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004806- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4807 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4808 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4809 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4810 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4811 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4812
4813 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4814
4815 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4816
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004817Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004818-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004819
4820- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4821
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004822- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4823
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004824- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4825 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004826
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004827- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4828 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4829 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4830 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4831 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4832 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004833 attributes.
4834
4835- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4836 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4837 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004838
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004839- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4840 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4841 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004842
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004843- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4844 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4845 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004846 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4847 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4848
4849- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4850 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004851
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004852Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004853-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004854
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004855- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4856 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4857
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004858- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4859 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4860 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4861 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4862
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004863- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4864 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4865 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4866 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4867
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004868 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4869 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4870 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4871 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4872 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4873 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4874 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4875 without losing information).
4876
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004877- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004878 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4879 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4880 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4881 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4882 module).
4883
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004884 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004885 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4886 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4887 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4888 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004889
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004890- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004891 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4892 encoding.
4893
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004894- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4895 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4896
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004897- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004898 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4899
4900- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4901 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4902 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4903 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4904
4905- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4906
4907- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4908 ON, and OFF.
4909
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004910- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4911 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4912
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004913Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004914-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004915
4916- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4917 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4918 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004919
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004920- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4921 been added: -X and -E.
4922
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004923Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004924-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004925
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004926- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4927 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4928
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004929C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004930-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004931
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004932- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4933 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4934 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4935 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4936 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4937
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004938- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4939 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4940 as long) arguments.
4941
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004942- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4943 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4944 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4945 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4946 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4947 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4948
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004949- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4950 input.
4951
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004952New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004953-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004954
4955Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004956-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004957
4958Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004959-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004960
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004961- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4962 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4963 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4964
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004965- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4966 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4967 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004968 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004969
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004970 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4971 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4972 import signal
4973 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004974
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004975 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004976 while 1:
4977 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004978 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004979 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4980 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4981 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4982 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004983
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004984
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004985What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4986===========================
4987
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004988*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4989
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004990Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004991--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004992
4993- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4994 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4995 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4996
4997- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4998 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4999 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
5000 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
5001 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
5002 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
5003 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005004
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005005- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005006 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005007 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
5008 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
5009 associate a docstring with a property.
5010
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005011- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
5012 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5013 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5014 other built-in object types.
5015
5016- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5017 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5018 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5019 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5020 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5021
5022- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5023 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5024
5025- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5026 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005027 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005028 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5029 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5030 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5031 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5032 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5033
5034- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5035 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5036 class.
5037
5038- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5039 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5040 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5041 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5042
5043- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5044 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5045 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5046 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5047
5048- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5049 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5050
5051- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5052 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5053 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5054 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5055 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005056 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005057 with the same value as s.
5058
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005059- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5060
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005061Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005062----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005063
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005064- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5065
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005066- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5067 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5068 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5069 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5070 objects.
5071
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005072- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5073 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005074 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5075 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5076
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005077- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5078 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5079 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5080
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005081Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005082-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005083
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005084- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5085 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5086 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5087 by the instances.
5088
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005089- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5090 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5091 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5092
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005093- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5094 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5095 before the entire comparison is complete.
5096
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005097- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5098 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5099 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5100
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005101- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5102 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5103 getwriter().
5104
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005105- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5106 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5107
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005108- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005109 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5110 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5111
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005112- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5113 iterable object.
5114
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005115- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5116 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005117
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005118- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5119 authentication.
5120
5121- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5122 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005123
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005124- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005125 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5126 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5127 a sample driver.)
5128
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005129Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005130-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005131
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005132- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5133 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5134 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5135 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5136 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5137 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5138 kernel has large file support.
5139
5140- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5141 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5142 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5143 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5144 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5145
5146- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5147 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5148 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5149
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005150C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005151-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005152
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005153- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5154 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5155
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005156New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005157-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005158
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005159- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5160 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5161
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005162Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005163-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005164
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005165- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5166 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5167 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5168 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5169 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5170
5171- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5172 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5173 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5174 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5175
5176- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5177 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5178
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005179Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005180-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005181
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005182- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005183 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5184 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005185
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005186
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005187What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5188===========================
5189
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005190*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5191
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005192Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005193----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005194
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005195- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5196 big to represent as a C double.
5197
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005198- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5199 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5200 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5201 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5202 restriction).
5203
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005204- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5205 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5206 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5207 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5208 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5209
5210 >>> dir([])
5211 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5212 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5213 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5214 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5215 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5216 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5217 'reverse', 'sort']
5218
5219 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5220
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005221- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005222 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5223 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5224 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5225 OverflowError exception.
5226
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005227- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005228 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005229 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5230 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5231 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5232 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5233 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005234 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005235 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5236 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5237
5238 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5239 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5240 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5241 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005242
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005243- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005244 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5245 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5246 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5247 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5248 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5249 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5250 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5251 once it is created.
5252
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005253- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5254 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5255 (key, value) pairs.
5256
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005257- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005258 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5259 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5260
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005261- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5262 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5263 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5264 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5265 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005266
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005267- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005268 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5269 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5270
5271 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5272
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005273- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005274 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5275
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005276Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005277-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005278
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005279- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005280 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5281 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005282
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005283- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5284 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5285 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5286 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5287 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5288 in this area anymore).
5289
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005290- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5291 threading.Timer.
5292
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005293- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5294 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5295
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005296- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005297 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5298
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005299- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005300 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5301 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5302 converted to Python longs.
5303
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005304- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005305 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5306
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005307- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5308 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5309 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5310
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005311Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005312-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005313
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005314- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5315 division operators as per PEP 238.
5316
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005317Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005318-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005319
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005320- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5321 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5322 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5323 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5324
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005325C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005326-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005327
5328- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005329
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005330- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5331 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005332 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005333
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005334 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5335 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005336 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005337 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005338
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005339- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005340 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5341 module:
5342
5343 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005344
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005345 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5346 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005347
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005348 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5349 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005350
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005351 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5352
5353 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5354
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005355- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005356 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5357 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5358 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005359
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005360New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005361-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005362
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005363- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5364 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5365 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5366 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5367 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005368
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005369Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005370-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005371
5372Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005373-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005374
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005375- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5376 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5377 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5378 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005379 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5380 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5381 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5382 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5383 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005384
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005385- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005386 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5387
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005388
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005389What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5390===========================
5391
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005392*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5393
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005394Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005395-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005396
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005397- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5398 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5399
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005400- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5401 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5402 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005403
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005404- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5405 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5406 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5407 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005408
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005409- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5410
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005411- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005412
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005413Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005414-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005415
5416- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005417 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005418 the module docstring for details.
5419
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005420Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005421-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005422
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005423- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005424 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5425 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5426 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005427
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005428- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5429 Nick Mathewson.
5430
5431Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005432----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005433
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005434- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5435 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5436 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5437 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5438 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5439 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5440 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5441 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5442
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005443- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5444 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5445 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5446 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5447
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005448- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5449 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5450 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5451 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5452 come a long way).
5453
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005454- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5455 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5456 write filters for these warnings).
5457
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005458- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5459 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5460 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5461 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5462 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5463
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005464- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5465 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5466 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5467 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5468 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5469 older distribution.
5470
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005471Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005472-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005473
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005474- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5475 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005476 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005477
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005478- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5479 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5480 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5481
5482- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5483
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005484- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5485
5486- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5487
5488- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5489
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005490- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005491
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005492- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5493
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005494New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005495-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005496
5497C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005498-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005499
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005500- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5501 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5502 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5503 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5504 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5505 against buffer overruns.
5506
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005507- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005508 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5509 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005510 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5511 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5512 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5513
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005514- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5515 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5516 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5517 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5518 deprecated.
5519
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005520Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005521-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005522
5523- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5524 relevant is found.
5525
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005526
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005527What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005528===========================
5529
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005530*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5531
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005532Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005533----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005534
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005535- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5536 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5537 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5538 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5539 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5540 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5541 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5542 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005543 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005544 repaired.
5545
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005546- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005547 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005548 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5549 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5550 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5551 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5552 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5553 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5554 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5555 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5556
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005557- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5558 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5559 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5560 leading BMO character).
5561
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005562- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5563 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5564 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5565
5566 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5567 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5568 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005569
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005570 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5571 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5572 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5573 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5574 for various simple to use conversions.
5575
5576 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5577 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5578
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005579 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5580 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5581 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5582 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5583 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5584 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5585 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5586 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5587 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5588 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5589 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5590 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5591 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5592 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5593 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005594
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005595- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5596 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5597 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005598 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005599 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005600
5601 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005602 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5603 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5604 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5605 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5606 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005607 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5608 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005609
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005610 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5611 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5612 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005613 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005614
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005615- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5616 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5617 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5618 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5619 floating arithmetic,
5620
5621 x = 9007199254740992.0
5622 print long(x)
5623
5624 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5625 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5626 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5627 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5628 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5629 functions are of good quality).
5630
5631 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5632 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5633 algorithms to break.
5634
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005635- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5636 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5637 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5638 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5639 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5640 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5641 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5642 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5643 order.
5644
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005645- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5646 operation along the most common code paths.
5647
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005648- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5649 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5650
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005651- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5652 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5653 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5654 {}.update(UserDict())
5655
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005656- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5657 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5658 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5659 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5660 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5661 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5662 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5663 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5664
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005665- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005666 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005667
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005668 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005669 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5670 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005671 join() method of strings
5672 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005673 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5674 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005675 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005676 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005677
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005678- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5679 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5680
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005681- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5682 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5683
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005684- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5685 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5686 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5687 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5688
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005689- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5690 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005691 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005692 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5693 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005694
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005695- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5696
5697
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005698Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005699-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005700
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005701- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005702 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005703 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5704 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5705
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005706- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5707 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5708
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005709- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5710 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5711 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5712 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5713
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005714- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5715 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5716 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5717
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005718- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5719
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005720- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5721
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005722- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5723 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5724 that are still imported into string.py).
5725
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005726- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5727
5728- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5729 Now it does.
5730
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005731- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5732
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005733- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5734 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5735 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5736 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5737 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005738 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5739 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005740
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005741- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5742 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5743 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5744 'help(object)'.
5745
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005746Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005747-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005748
5749- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005750 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005751 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5752 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5753
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005754- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005755 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5756 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005757
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005758C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005759-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005760
5761- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5762 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005763
5764----
5765
5766**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**