blob: 5bf94c0d3248752bce167967825e95065e4591dc [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2006*
11
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000012Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Georg Brandl4550b8d2005-08-26 06:43:52 +000015- Disallow keyword arguments for type constructors that don't use them
Georg Brandl02c42872005-08-26 06:42:30 +000016 (fixes bug #1119418).
17
Martin v. Löwisd35edda2005-08-24 08:39:24 +000018- Forward UnicodeDecodeError into SyntaxError for source encoding errors.
19
Barry Warsawe2eca0b2005-08-15 18:14:19 +000020- SF bug #900092: When tracing (e.g. for hotshot), restore 'return' events for
21 exceptions that cause a function to exit.
22
Raymond Hettinger9f1a6792005-07-31 01:16:36 +000023- The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
24 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
25 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
26
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +000027- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
28
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +000029- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
30 reference counts in some error exit cases.
31
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000032- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
33 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
34 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
35 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
36 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
37 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
38 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
39 realloc.
40
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +000041- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
42 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
43
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +000044- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
45 like their int counterparts.
46
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +000047- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
48 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
49 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
50 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
51 for a longer write-up of the problem).
52
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +000053- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
54 serializing floats.
55
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +000056- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
57 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
58 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
59
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +000060- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
61 278.
62
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +000063- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
64 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
65 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
66 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
67 to the base class has been moved the prroper nb_* magic slot and out of
68 PyNumber_*().
69 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
70
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +000071- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
72 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
73 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
74 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
75
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +000076- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
77 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
78 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
79 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
80 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
81
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +000082- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
83 disabled caused a crash.
84
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +000085- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
86 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
87
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000088- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000089 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
90
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +000091- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
92
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +000093- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +000094 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
95 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
96 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +000097
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +000098- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
99
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +0000100- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
101 returning None.
102
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000103- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +0000104 ('\') with a specific error message.
105
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +0000106- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
107
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +0000108- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
109 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
110
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000111- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000112 an ferror() call.
113
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000114- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
115 list.sort().
116
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000117- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
118 (2+3) --> (5).
119
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000120- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
121
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000122- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
123 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000124
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000125- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
126 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
127 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
128
Neil Schemenauercf52c072005-08-12 17:34:58 +0000129- Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a
130 unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and
131 calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance.
132
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000133Extension Modules
134-----------------
135
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000136- Patch #756021: Special-case socket.inet_aton('255.255.255.255') for
137 platforms that don't have inet_aton().
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000138
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000139- Bug #1215928: Fix bz2.BZ2File.seek() for 64-bit file offsets.
140
141- Bug #1191043: Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines for files containing one
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000142 line without newlines.
143
Georg Brandl38387b82005-08-24 07:17:40 +0000144- Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did
145 on Windows.
146
Martin v. Löwisebd9d5b2005-08-09 15:00:59 +0000147- Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
148 st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
149
Michael W. Hudson8137bea2005-07-27 20:24:40 +0000150- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
151 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
152 for large or negative values.
153
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000154- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000155 implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false.
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000156
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000157- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
158
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000159- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
160 if available on the platform.
161
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000162- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
163 available on the platform.
164
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000165- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
166 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
167
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000168- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
169
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000170- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
171 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
172 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
173
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000174- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
175
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000176- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
177 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
178
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000179- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000180 file size.
181
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000182- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
183
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000184- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
185 {remove_history,replace_history}
186
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000187- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
188 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000189
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000190- stat_float_times is now True.
191
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000192- array.array objects are now picklable.
193
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000194- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
195 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
196
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000197- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
198 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
199 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
200
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000201- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
202 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000203
204Library
205-------
206
Martin v. Löwis8b595142005-08-25 11:03:38 +0000207- Bug #1163178: Make IDNA return an empty string when the input is empty.
208
Georg Brandl532efab2005-08-24 22:34:21 +0000209- Patch #848017: Make Cookie more RFC-compliant. Use CRLF as default output
210 separator and do not output trailing semicola.
211
Georg Brandlb9256022005-08-24 18:46:39 +0000212- Patch #1062060: urllib.urlretrieve() now raises a new exception, named
213 ContentTooShortException, when the actually downloaded size does not
214 match the Content-Length header.
215
Martin v. Löwis0a5d4a22005-08-24 14:55:22 +0000216- Bug #1121494: distutils.dir_utils.mkpath now accepts Unicode strings.
217
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000218- Bug #1178484: Return complete lines from codec stream readers
219 even if there is an exception in later lines, resulting in
220 correct line numbers for decoding errors in source code.
221
Georg Brandl6d2b3462005-08-24 07:36:17 +0000222- Bug #1192315: Disallow negative arguments to clear() in pdb.
223
Martin v. Löwisb813c532005-08-07 20:51:04 +0000224- Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
225
Georg Brandl649f8e72005-08-03 07:30:12 +0000226- Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
227 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
228
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000229- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
230 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
231 Tkdnd.
232
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000233- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
234 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
235
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000236- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
237 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
238
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000239- textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000240 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
241
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000242- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
243 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
244
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000245- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
246 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
247
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000248- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000249 it can be missing in embedded interpreters
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000250
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000251- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
252
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000253- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
254 error messages.
255
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000256- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
257
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000258- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
259 Bug #1224621.
260
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000261- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
262 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
263 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
264 terminates by raising StopIteration.
265
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000266- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
267
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000268- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
269 component of the path.
270
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000271- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
272 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
273 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
274 class at all.
275
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000276- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
277 files to PyPI.
278
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000279- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
280 them to PyPI.
281
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000282- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
283 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
284 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
285 work as expected.
286
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000287- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
288 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
289
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000290- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000291 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
292
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000293- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
294
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000295- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
296 to build.
297
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000298- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
299 symbolic links on Windows.
300
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000301- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000302 profile.py if available.
303
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000304- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
305
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000306- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
307 in LWPCookieJar.
308
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000309- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
310
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000311- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
312
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000313- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
314
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000315- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
316
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000317- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
318
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000319- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
320
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000321- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
322
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000323- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
324
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000325- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
326 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
327 be exploited in various ways.
328
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000329- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
330
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000331- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
332
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000333- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
334
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000335- Enhancements to the csv module:
336
337 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000338 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000339 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000340 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
341 reporting.
342 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
343 dictates.
344 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000345 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000346 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000347 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
348 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000349 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
350 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000351 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000352 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
353 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
354 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
355 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
356 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
357 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
358 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
359 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
360 without first creating a dialect class.
361 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
362 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
363 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000364 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000365 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
366 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000367 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
368 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
369 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
370 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000371 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
372 This has been fixed.
373
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000374- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
375 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
376 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
377 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
378
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000379- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
380
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000381- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
382 (Bug #951915).
383
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000384- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
385 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
386 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000387 encoding alias table.
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000388
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000389- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
390
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000391- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
392 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
393
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000394- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
395
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000396- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
397
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000398- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
399
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000400- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
401
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000402- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
403
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000404- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
405 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
406 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
407
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000408- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000409 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000410
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000411- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
412 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
413 tokenizer with very long source lines.
414
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000415- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
416 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
417
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000418- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
419 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000420
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000421- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
422 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
423
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000424- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
425 correctly.
426
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000427- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
428 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
429 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
430 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
431 between two lines.
432
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000433
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000434Build
435-----
436
Martin v. Löwis147fbe52005-08-07 21:09:30 +0000437- Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
438 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
439
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000440- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
441 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
442
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000443- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
444 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
445 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000446 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000447
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000448- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
449 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
450 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
451
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000452- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
453
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000454- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
455 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
456
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000457- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
458 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
459 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
460 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
461 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
462 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
463 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
464 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
465
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000466- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
467 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
468 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
469 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
470
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000471
472C API
473-----
474
Raymond Hettingerbeb31012005-08-16 03:47:52 +0000475- Added a C API for set and frozenset objects.
476
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000477- Removed PyRange_New().
478
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000479
480Tests
481-----
482
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000483- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000484
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000485
486Documentation
487-------------
488
Georg Brandl79c122f2005-08-24 07:31:33 +0000489- Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py.
490
Georg Brandl6f2bbd32005-08-24 07:26:55 +0000491- Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation.
492
Georg Brandlf13c4ba2005-08-02 10:28:08 +0000493- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
494
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000495- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
496
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000497- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
498
499- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
500
501- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
502
503- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
504
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000505- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
506 Closes bug #1166582.
507
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000508- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
509 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
510 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
511
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000512Mac
513---
514
515
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000516New platforms
517-------------
518
519- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
520
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000521
522Tools/Demos
523-----------
524
Georg Brandl56897312005-08-24 18:32:30 +0000525- Added two new files to Tools/scripts: pysource.py, which recursively
526 finds Python source files, and findnocoding.py, which finds Python
527 source files that need an encoding declaration.
528 Patch #784089, credits to Oleg Broytmann.
529
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000530- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
531
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000532- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000533
534
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000535What's New in Python 2.4 final?
536===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000537
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000538*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000539
540Core and builtins
541-----------------
542
543- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
544 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
545 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
546
547
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000548What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
549==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000550
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000551*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000552
553Core and builtins
554-----------------
555
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000556- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
557 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
558 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
559
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000560
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000561Library
562-------
563
564- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
565 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
566 raised is re-raised.
567
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000568- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
569 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
570
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000571- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
572 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
573 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
574 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
575 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
576 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
577 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
578 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
579 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
580 by the slice are recomputed now.
581
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000582- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000583
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000584Build
585-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000586
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000587- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
588 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
589 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000590
591C API
592-----
593
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000594- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
595
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000596
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000597What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
598================================
599
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000600*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000601
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000602License
603-------
604
605The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
606is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
607changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
608Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
609intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
610durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
611the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
612License::
613
614 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
615
616says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
617to Python 2.1.1.
618
619The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
620License Version 2.
621
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000622Core and builtins
623-----------------
624
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000625- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
626 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
627 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
628 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
629 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
630 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
631 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
632 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
633 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
634 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
635
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000636- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000637
638Extension Modules
639-----------------
640
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000641- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
642 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
643 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
644 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000645
646Library
647-------
648
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000649- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
650 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
651 returned.
652
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000653- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
654
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000655- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
656 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
657
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000658- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
659
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000660- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
661 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000662
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000663- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
664
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000665- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
666
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000667- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000668 the source code is updated and reloaded.
669
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000670Build
671-----
672
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000673- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000674
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000675What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
676================================
677
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000678*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000679
680Core and builtins
681-----------------
682
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000683- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000684 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
685
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000686- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
687 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
688 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
689 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
690
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000691- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
692 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
693
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000694- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
695 constant.
696
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000697- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
698 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
699 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
700 large), and to anomalies such as
701 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
702 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
703 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
704 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000705
706Extension modules
707-----------------
708
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000709- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
710 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000711 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
712 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
713 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000714
715Library
716-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000717
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000718- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000719 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000720 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
721 --swig-cpp.
722
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000723- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
724 it is set.
725
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000726- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000727
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000728- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
729 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
730 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
731 Closes bug #1039270.
732
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000733- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000734
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000735 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000736 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
737 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
738 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
739 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
740 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
741 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
742 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
743 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
744 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
745 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
746 + Updates to documentation.
747
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000748- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
749 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
750 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
751 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
752
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000753- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000754
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000755- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
756 applications should use the getmember function.
757
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000758- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
759
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000760- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
761 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
762 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
763 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
764 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
765 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
766 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
767 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
768 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
769
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000770- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
771 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000772 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000773
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000774- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
775 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
776 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
777 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
778 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
779 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
780 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
781 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000782
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000783- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
784 the new public features (of which there are many).
785
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000786- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000787 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
788 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
789 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
790 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000791 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000792
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000793- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
794
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000795- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
796 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
797 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
798 options.
799
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000800- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
801 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
802 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
803 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
804 conditions under which non-string values work.
805
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000806Build
807-----
808
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000809- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
810 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
811 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
812
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000813- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
814 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
815 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
816 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
817 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000818
819C API
820-----
821
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000822- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
823 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
824
825- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
826
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000827- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
828 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
829 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
830 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
831 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
832 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
833 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
834 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
835 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
836
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000837- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
838
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000839- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
840 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
841 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000842
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000843Tests
844-----
845
846- test__locale ported to unittest
847
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000848Mac
849---
850
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000851- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
852 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
853 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000854
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000855Tools/Demos
856-----------
857
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000858- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
859 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
860 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
861 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
862 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000863
864
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000865What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
866=================================
867
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000868*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000869
870Core and builtins
871-----------------
872
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000873- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000874 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
875
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000876- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
877 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
878 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
879 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
880 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
881 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
882 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
883 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000884 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
885 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
886 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
887 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
888 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000889
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000890- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
891 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
892 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
893 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
894 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
895
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000896- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
897
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000898- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
899 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
900
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000901- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
902 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
903 modified the list.
904
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000905- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
906 functions is now writable.
907
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000908- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
909 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
910 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
911 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
912
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000913- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
914 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
915 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
916 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
917 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000918
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000919- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
920 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
921
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000922Extension modules
923-----------------
924
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000925- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
926
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000927- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
928 data.
929
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000930- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
931 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
932 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
933 supposed to have been truncated away.
934
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000935- Added socket.socketpair().
936
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000937- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
938 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
939
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000940- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000941 versions of Python, have now been removed.
942
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000943Library
944-------
945
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000946- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000947 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000948
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000949- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
950 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
951
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000952- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
953 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
954
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000955- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
956
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000957- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
958 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000959
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000960- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
961 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
962
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000963- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
964
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000965- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
966
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000967- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
968
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000969- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
970 Percivall.
971
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000972- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
973 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
974
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000975- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
976 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
977 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000978 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000979
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000980- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
981 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
982 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
983 and exponent.
984
985- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
986
987- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +0000988 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000989 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
990
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000991- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
992 to the readline module.
993
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000994- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000995 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
996 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000997
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000998- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
999 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
1000 contains symlinks.
1001
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +00001002- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
1003 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
1004
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +00001005- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
1006 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
1007 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1008
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001009- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
1010 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
1011 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
1012 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
1013 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
1014 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
1015 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
1016 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
1017 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
1018 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
1019 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
1020 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
1021 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
1022
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +00001023- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
1024
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001025Tools/Demos
1026-----------
1027
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001028- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
1029 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
1030
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +00001031- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
1032
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001033Build
1034-----
1035
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001036- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
1037 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
1038 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
1039 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
1040 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
1041 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
1042 plans to do so.
1043
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +00001044- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
1045 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
1046
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +00001047- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
1048 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
1049
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001050- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
1051 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
1052
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +00001053- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
1054 GNU/k*BSD systems.
1055
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +00001056- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
1057 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
1058
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001059C API
1060-----
1061
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001062..
1063
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001064Documentation
1065-------------
1066
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001067- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1068 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1069
1070- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1071 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1072 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001073
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001074New platforms
1075-------------
1076
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001077- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1078
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001079Tests
1080-----
1081
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001082..
1083
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001084Windows
1085-------
1086
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001087- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1088 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1089 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1090 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1091 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1092 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1093 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1094 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1095 the problem.
1096
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001097Mac
1098---
1099
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001100..
1101
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001102
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001103What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1104=================================
1105
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001106*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001107
1108Core and builtins
1109-----------------
1110
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001111- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1112 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1113 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1114 sensitive code.
1115
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001116- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001117 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001118
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001119 @staticmethod
1120 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001121
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001122 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001123
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001124- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1125 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1126 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1127 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1128 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1129 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1130 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1131 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1132 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1133 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1134 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1135
1136 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1137 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1138 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1139 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1140 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1141 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1142 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1143
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001144- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1145 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1146
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001147- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001148 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001149
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001150- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001151 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001152 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1153
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001154- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001155 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1156 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1157
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001158- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1159 types that support garbage collection.
1160
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001161- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1162
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001163- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1164 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1165 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1166 Jython.
1167
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001168- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1169
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001170- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1171 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1172
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001173- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1174 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1175 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001176
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001177- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1178 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1179 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1180
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001181Extension modules
1182-----------------
1183
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001184- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1185
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001186Library
1187-------
1188
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001189- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1190 TIS-620
1191
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001192- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1193 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1194 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1195 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1196 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1197 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1198 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1199 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1200 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1201 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1202
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001203- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1204
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001205- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1206 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1207 same as when the argument is omitted).
1208 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1209
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001210- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1211
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001212- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1213 schemes are offered.
1214
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001215- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1216
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001217- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1218 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1219 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1220
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001221- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1222
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001223- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1224 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1225
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001226- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1227 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1228 when dummy_threading is being used.
1229
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001230- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1231 from a tarfile.
1232
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001233- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001234 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001235
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001236- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1237 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1238 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1239 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1240
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001241- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1242 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1243
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001244- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1245 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1246 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1247 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1248 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1249 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1250 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1251 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1252 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1253 by some other method in progress).
1254
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001255- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1256 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1257 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001258
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001259- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1260
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001261- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1262 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1263 AM Kuchling.
1264
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001265- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1266 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1267 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1268
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001269- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1270 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1271 instead of unsigned.
1272
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001273- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001274 no longer part of the public API.
1275
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001276- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1277 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1278 string methods of the same name).
1279
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001280- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001281 SF patch 945642.
1282
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001283- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1284
1285 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1286
1287 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1288 DocTestSuites.
1289
1290- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1291 that provide thread-local data.
1292
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001293- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1294 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1295
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001296- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1297
1298- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1299 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1300 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1301
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001302- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1303
1304 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1305 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1306 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001307
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001308 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1309 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1310 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1311 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1312
1313 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1314 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1315
1316 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1317 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1318 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1319 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1320
1321 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1322 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1323 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1324 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1325 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1326
1327 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1328 wrapping help output.
1329
1330 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1331 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1332 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001333
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001334C API
1335-----
1336
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001337- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1338 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1339 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1340 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1341 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1342 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1343 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1344 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1345 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1346 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1347 its visible semantics have not changed.
1348
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001349- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1350 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1351
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001352Documentation
1353-------------
1354
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001355- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001356
1357 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001358 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001359
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001360 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001361
1362 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1363
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001364- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001365
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001366Tests
1367-----
1368
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001369- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001370 platforms that use the Makefile.
1371
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001372- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1373 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1374 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1375
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001376
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001377What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1378=================================
1379
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001380*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001381
1382Core and builtins
1383-----------------
1384
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001385- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1386 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1387 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1388 objects now (one object instead of three).
1389
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001390- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1391 Windows DLLs.
1392
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001393- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1394 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001395
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001396- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1397 a new .pyc magic.
1398
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001399- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1400 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1401 be there.
1402
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001403- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1404 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1405 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1406
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001407- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1408 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1409 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1410
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001411- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1412
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001413- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1414 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1415 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001416
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001417- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1418 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1419
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001420- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1421
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001422- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001423 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001424
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001425- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1426
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001427- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1428
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001429- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1430 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1431
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001432- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1433 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1434 Fixes bug #858016 .
1435
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001436- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1437 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1438 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1439
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001440- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1441 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1442 improves their performance (about 35%).
1443
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001444- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1445 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1446 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1447
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001448- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1449 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1450 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1451 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1452
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001453- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1454 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001455 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001456 length is not known).
1457
1458- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1459 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001460 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1461 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001462 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1463
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001464- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1465 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1466
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001467- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1468 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1469 keyword arguments.
1470
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001471- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1472 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1473 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1474
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001475- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1476 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1477 cases.
1478
1479- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1480 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1481 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1482 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1483 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1484 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1485 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1486 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1487 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1488 a release build.
1489
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001490- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1491 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1492
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001493- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001494 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001495
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001496- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1497 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1498 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1499 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1500 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1501 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1502 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1503 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1504 destroyed.
1505
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001506- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1507 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1508 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1509 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1510 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1511 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1512 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1513 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1514
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001515- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1516 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1517 character other than a space.
1518
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001519- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1520 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1521 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1522 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1523 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1524 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1525 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1526 attributes with the same name.
1527
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001528- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1529 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1530 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1531 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1532 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1533 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1534 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1535 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1536 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1537 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1538 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1539 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1540 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1541 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001542
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001543- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1544 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1545 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1546 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1547 This has been repaired.
1548
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001549- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1550
1551- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1552
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001553- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1554 over a sequence.
1555
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001556- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001557 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001558
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001559- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1560
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001561- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1562 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1563 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1564 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1565 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1566 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1567 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1568 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1569
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001570- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1571 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1572 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1573
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001574- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1575 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1576 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1577 freelist.
1578
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001579- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1580 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1581
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001582- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1583 number.
1584
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001585- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1586 a TypeError exception.
1587
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001588- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1589 820195.
1590
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001591- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1592 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1593 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1594
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001595- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001596 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1597 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001598
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001599- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1600 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1601 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1602
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001603- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1604 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001605 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001606
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001607- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001608 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1609 the first call.
1610
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001611
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001612Extension modules
1613-----------------
1614
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001615- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1616 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1617
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001618- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1619 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1620 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1621 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1622 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1623 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1624 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001625
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001626- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1627
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001628- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1629
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001630- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1631 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1632
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001633- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1634 fewer false positives.
1635
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001636- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1637 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1638
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001639- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001640 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1641
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001642- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001643 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001644 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001645 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1646 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001647
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001648- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1649 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1650 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1651 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1652
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001653- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1654 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1655 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1656 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1657 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1658 #897625.
1659
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001660- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1661 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1662
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001663- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1664 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1665 and pops on either side of the deque.
1666
1667- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1668 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1669
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001670- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1671 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1672 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1673 other functions that expect a function argument.
1674
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001675- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1676
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001677- os.getsid was added.
1678
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001679- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1680 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1681 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1682
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001683- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1684
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001685- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1686
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001687- readline.clear_history was added.
1688
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001689- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1690
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001691- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1692
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001693- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1694
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001695- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1696
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001697- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1698
1699- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1700
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001701- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1702
1703- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1704
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001705- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1706 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1707 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1708
1709- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1710 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1711 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1712 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1713 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1714 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1715 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1716
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001717- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1718 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1719 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1720 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001721
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001722- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001723 iterators from a single iterable.
1724
1725- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1726 of raising a TypeError exception.
1727
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001728- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1729 as parameter.
1730
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001731Library
1732-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001733
Georg Brandlf0de6a12005-08-22 18:02:59 +00001734- Bug #1266283: The new function "lexists" is now in os.path.__all__.
1735
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001736- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1737 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1738 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001739
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001740- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1741 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1742 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001743
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001744- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001745
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001746- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1747 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001748
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001749- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1750 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1751
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001752- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1753
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001754- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001755 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001756
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001757- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001758 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001759
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001760- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1761
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001762- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1763 on cygwin and mingw32.
1764
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001765- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1766
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001767- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1768 module.
1769
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001770- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1771 installation scheme for all platforms.
1772
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001773- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001774 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001775
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001776- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1777 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1778 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1779
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001780- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1781 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1782 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1783
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001784- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1785
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001786- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1787
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001788- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1789 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1790
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001791- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1792 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1793 type pattern with the same value exists.
1794
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001795- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1796 when run from the command prompt).
1797
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001798- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1799 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1800
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001801- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1802 default sort).
1803
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001804- Added global runctx function to profile module
1805
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001806- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1807
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001808- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1809
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001810- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1811
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001812- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001813 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1814 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1815 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1816 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1817 accordingly.
1818
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001819- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1820 decoding standards.
1821
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001822- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1823 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1824 called for all requests.
1825
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001826- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1827 they are passed to the compiler.
1828
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001829- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1830 indent, width and depth.
1831
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001832- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1833 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1834
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001835- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1836 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1837
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001838- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1839
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001840- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1841
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001842- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1843
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001844- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1845 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1846
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001847- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001848 for better performance.
1849
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001850- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001851
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001852- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1853 a string).
1854
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001855- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1856
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001857- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1858
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001859- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1860
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001861- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1862
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001863- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1864 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1865 list of fieldnames.
1866
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001867- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1868 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1869
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001870- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1871
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001872- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1873 empty lists.
1874
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001875- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1876 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1877 and shelves.
1878
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001879- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1880 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1881
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001882- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001883 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1884 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001885
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001886- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1887 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001888 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001889
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001890- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001891 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1892 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1893
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001894- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1895 and removed in Py2.4.
1896
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001897- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1898
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001899- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1900
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001901Tools/Demos
1902-----------
1903
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001904- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1905 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1906
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001907- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1908
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001909- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1910 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1911 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1912 destination in situations where both files are given.
1913
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001914- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1915 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1916 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1917 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1918
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001919- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1920
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001921- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1922 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1923 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1924 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1925 now.
1926
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001927- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1928 in effect
1929
1930- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1931 C-c C-h
1932
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001933- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1934 -d option was given.
1935
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001936Build
1937-----
1938
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001939- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1940 build under OS X.
1941
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001942- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1943 --enable-profiling.
1944
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001945- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1946 is configured --with-tsc.
1947
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001948- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1949 on AMD64.
1950
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001951- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1952 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1953
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001954- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1955 removed.
1956
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001957- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1958 supported (see PEP 11).
1959
1960- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1961
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001962- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1963
1964- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1965 (see PEP 11).
1966
1967- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1968 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1969
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001970C API
1971-----
1972
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001973- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1974 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1975 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1976
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001977- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1978 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1979 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1980 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1981
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001982- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1983 generator objects.
1984
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001985- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1986 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001987 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1988 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001989
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001990- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1991 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1992
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001993- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1994 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1995 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1996 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1997 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1998
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001999- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
2000 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
2001 about 10% faster.
2002
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00002003- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
2004 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
2005
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00002006- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
2007 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
2008 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
2009 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
2010
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002011Windows
2012-------
2013
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00002014- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
2015 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
2016 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
2017 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
2018
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00002019- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
2020 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
2021 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
2022
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002023
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002024What's New in Python 2.3 final?
2025===============================
2026
2027*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
2028
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002029IDLE
2030----
2031
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00002032- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
2033 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
2034 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
2035 context-menu actions.
2036
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002037- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
2038 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
2039 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
2040 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
2041 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
2042 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
2043 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
2044 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
2045 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
2046
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002047
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002048What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
2049=============================================
2050
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00002051*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002052
2053Core and builtins
2054-----------------
2055
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002056- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002057 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002058 comment at the end are still unsupported.
2059
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002060Extension modules
2061-----------------
2062
2063- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
2064 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
2065 than once. This has been fixed.
2066
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002067- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2068 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2069 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2070 call.
2071
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002072- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2073
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002074Library
2075-------
2076
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002077- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2078 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2079
2080- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2081 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2082 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2083 restored.
2084
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002085IDLE
2086----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002087
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002088- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002089
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002090Build
2091-----
2092
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002093- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2094 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2095
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002096C API
2097-----
2098
2099Windows
2100-------
2101
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002102- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2103 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2104
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002105- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2106
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002107Mac
2108---
2109
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002110- Various fixes to pimp.
2111
2112- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2113
2114- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2115 more problems than it solves.
2116
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002117
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002118What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2119=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002120
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002121*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2122
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002123Core and builtins
2124-----------------
2125
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002126- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2127 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2128
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002129- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2130 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002131 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002132
2133- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2134 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2135 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002136 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002137
2138- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2139 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002140
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002141- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2142 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2143 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2144
2145- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002146 770247.
2147
2148- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002149
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002150Extension modules
2151-----------------
2152
2153- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2154 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2155
2156- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2157
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002158- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2159
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002160- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2161 contained within the _strptime module.
2162
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002163- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2164 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2165
2166- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002167 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2168
2169- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2170 the find_class attribute, if present.
2171
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002172- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002173
2174 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2175 (SF bug 763298).
2176
2177 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002178 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2179 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2180 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002181
2182 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2183
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002184Library
2185-------
2186
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002187- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2188
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002189- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2190 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2191 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2192 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2193 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2194 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2195 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2196 or Tester().
2197
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002198- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2199 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2200 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2201 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2202 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2203 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2204 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2205 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2206 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002207
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002208 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002209
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002210- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2211 weren't before was an oversight.
2212
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002213- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2214 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2215
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002216- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2217 when there are no lines.
2218
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002219- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2220 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2221
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002222- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2223 to child processes.
2224
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002225- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2226
2227- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2228
2229- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2230 xmlrpclib.
2231
2232- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2233 responses.
2234
2235- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2236 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2237
2238- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2239 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2240 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2241
2242- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2243 used as patterns.
2244
2245- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2246 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2247 than Tk 8.3.
2248
2249- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2250
2251- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002252
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002253Tools/Demos
2254-----------
2255
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002256- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2257
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002258- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2259
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002260- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002261
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002262Build
2263-----
2264
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002265- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2266
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002267- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2268
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002269- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2270 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002271
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002272- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2273 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2274 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002275
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002276C API
2277-----
2278
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002279- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2280 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2281
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002282Windows
2283-------
2284
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002285- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2286 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2287 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2288 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2289 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2290 Python exception ::
2291
2292 thread.error: can't start new thread
2293
2294 is raised now.
2295
2296- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2297 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2298 instead of from DLL teardown.
2299
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002300Mac
2301---
2302
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002303- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002304 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002305 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2306 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2307 the executable in the bundle.
2308
2309- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002310
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002311- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2312
2313- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2314 on Panther.
2315
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002316What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2317================================
2318
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002319*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002320
2321Core and builtins
2322-----------------
2323
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002324- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2325 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2326 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2327 with the -i option.
2328
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002329- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2330 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2331
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002332- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2333 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2334
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002335- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2336 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2337 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2338 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2339 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2340 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2341 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2342 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2343 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2344 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2345 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2346 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2347 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002348
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002349- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2350 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2351 embedded in a lambda expression.
2352
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002353- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2354 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2355 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2356 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2357 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2358
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002359- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2360 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2361 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2362
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002363- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2364 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2365
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002366- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2367 It's writable again.
2368
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002369- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2370 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2371 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002372 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002373
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002374- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2375 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2376 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2377
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002378Extension modules
2379-----------------
2380
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002381- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2382 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2383
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002384- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2385 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2386 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2387 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2388
2389- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2390 collection.
2391
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002392- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2393 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2394 unique within a single program run.
2395
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002396- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2397 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2398
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002399- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2400 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2401
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002402- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2403 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002404
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002405- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2406
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002407- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2408 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2409
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002410- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2411 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2412 for many BSD-derived systems.
2413
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002414
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002415Library
2416-------
2417
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002418- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2419 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2420 primary ones:
2421
2422 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2423 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2424 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2425
2426 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2427 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2428 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2429 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2430 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2431 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2432
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002433- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2434 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2435 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2436 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2437 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2438 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2439 argument.
2440
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002441- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2442 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2443 in the archive.
2444
2445- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2446 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2447
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002448- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2449 569574).
2450
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002451- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2452 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2453 no more.
2454
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002455- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2456 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2457 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2458 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2459 code coverage.
2460
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002461- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2462 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2463 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002464 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2465 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002466
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002467- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2468 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2469 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002470 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002471
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002472- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2473
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002474- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2475 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2476 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2477 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2478
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002479- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2480 handling.
2481
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002482- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2483 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2484
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002485- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2486 in socket.py.
2487
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002488- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2489
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002490- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2491 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2492 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2493 opener with proxy support.
2494
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002495- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2496
2497- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2498
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002499Tools/Demos
2500-----------
2501
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002502- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2503
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002504- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2505
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002506- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2507 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002508
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002509- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2510 files.
2511
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002512Build
2513-----
2514
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002515- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002516 different root directory.
2517
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002518C API
2519-----
2520
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002521- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2522 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2523 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2524 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2525 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2526 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2527 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2528 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2529 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2530 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2531
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002532- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2533 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2534 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2535 from Python.
2536
2537
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002538New platforms
2539-------------
2540
2541None this time.
2542
2543Tests
2544-----
2545
2546- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2547 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2548
2549Windows
2550-------
2551
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002552- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2553
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002554- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2555 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2556 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2557 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2558 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2559 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2560 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2561 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2562 that's what it's for.
2563
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002564Mac
2565---
2566
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002567- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2568 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2569 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2570 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002571- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2572 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2573- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002574
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002575SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2576------------------------------------
2577
2578430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2579598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2580622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2581661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2582683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2583697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2584713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2585724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2586727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2587729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2588730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2589731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2590732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2591733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2592735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2593740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2594744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2595745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2596747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2597749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2598751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2599753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2600755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2601757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2602760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2603
2604
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002605What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2606================================
2607
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002608*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002609
2610Core and builtins
2611-----------------
2612
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002613- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2614 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2615
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002616- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2617 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2618 and cannot be strings).
2619
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002620- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2621 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2622 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2623 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2624
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002625- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2626 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2627 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2628 Python itself.
2629
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002630- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2631 the referenced object, if it has one.
2632
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002633- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2634 the thread started at
2635 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2636
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002637- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2638 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2639 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2640 placed on a list index.
2641
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002642- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2643 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2644 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2645 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2646
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002647- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2648 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2649 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2650 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2651 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2652 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2653 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2654
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002655- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2656 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2657 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2658 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2659 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2660
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002661- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2662 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002663
2664- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2665 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2666 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2667 #693195.)
2668
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002669- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2670 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002671
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002672- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002673 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002674 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2675 interpreter executions, would fail.
2676
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002677- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002678 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002679 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002680
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002681Extension modules
2682-----------------
2683
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002684- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2685 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2686 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2687 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2688
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002689- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2690 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2691
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002692- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2693 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2694 and Greg Chapman.)
2695
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002696- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2697 recursively.
2698
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002699- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002700 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2701 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2702 leaks.
2703
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002704- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2705
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002706- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2707 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2708 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2709 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2710 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2711 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2712 #705836.
2713
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002714- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002715 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2716
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002717- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2718 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2719 See SF bug #692416.
2720
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002721- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2722 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2723
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002724- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2725 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2726 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002727
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002728- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002729 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2730 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2731
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002732- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2733 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2734 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2735 timeouts to work properly.
2736
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002737Library
2738-------
2739
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002740- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2741 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2742 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2743 future release.
2744
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002745- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2746 for querying platform dependent features.
2747
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002748- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002749
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002750- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2751 pickle protocol versions.
2752
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002753- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2754 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2755 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2756
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002757- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2758
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002759- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2760 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2761 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2762 modules.
2763
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002764- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2765 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2766 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2767
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002768- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2769 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2770
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002771- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2772 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2773 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2774
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002775- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002776 MS Office extensions.
2777
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002778- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2779 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2780
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002781- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2782 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2783
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002784- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2785 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2786 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2787 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2788 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2789 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2790
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002791- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2792 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2793 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002794
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002795- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2796 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2797 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2798
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002799- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2800
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002801- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2802 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2803 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2804
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002805Tools/Demos
2806-----------
2807
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002808- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2809 See the module docstring for details.
2810
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002811Build
2812-----
2813
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002814- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2815 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002816
2817C API
2818-----
2819
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002820- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2821
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002822- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2823 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2824 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2825
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002826- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2827 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002828
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002829 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2830 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2831 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002832
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002833- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002834 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2835
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002836- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2837 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2838 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002839
2840New platforms
2841-------------
2842
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002843None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002844
2845Tests
2846-----
2847
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002848- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2849 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002850
2851Windows
2852-------
2853
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002854- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2855 function.
2856
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002857- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2858 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002859
2860Mac
2861---
2862
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002863- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2864 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002865
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002866- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2867 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002868
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002869- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2870 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2871 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002872
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002873- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002874 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2875 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002876
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002877- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2878 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002879
2880
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002881What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2882=================================
2883
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002884*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002885
2886Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002887-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002888
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002889- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2890 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2891 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2892
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002893- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2894 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2895 (SF patch #664376.)
2896
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002897- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2898 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2899 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2900 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2901 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2902 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002903 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002904
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002905- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2906 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2907 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2908 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002909 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002910
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002911- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2912 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2913 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2914 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2915 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2916 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2917 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2918 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2919 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2920 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2921 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2922
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002923- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2924 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2925 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2926 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2927 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2928 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2929
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002930- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2931 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2932
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002933- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2934 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2935 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2936 case.)
2937
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002938- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2939 passed as unicode strings.
2940
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002941- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2942 See SF bug #683467.
2943
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002944- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2945 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2946
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002947- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2948
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002949- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2950
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002951- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2952 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2953 arguments.
2954
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002955- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2956 See SF bug #667147.
2957
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002958- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002959 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002960 See SF bug #676155.
2961
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002962- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002963 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002964 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2965 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2966 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2967 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2968 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2969 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002970
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002971Extension modules
2972-----------------
2973
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002974- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2975 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2976 tp_as_number pointer.
2977
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002978- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2979 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2980 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2981 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2982 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2983
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002984- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2985
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002986- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2987
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002988- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002989 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002990 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2991 patch #678531.)
2992
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002993- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2994 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2995
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002996- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2997 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2998
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002999- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
3000
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00003001- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
3002 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
3003 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
3004
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003005- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
3006
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003007- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
3008 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
3009
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003010- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003011
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003012- datetime changes:
3013
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00003014 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
3015
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003016 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
3017 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
3018 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
3019 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
3020 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
3021 now.
3022
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003023 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003024 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
3025 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003026
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003027 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003028 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003029 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
3030 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
3031 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
3032 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003033
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003034 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
3035 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
3036 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003037 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
3038
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003039 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
3040 by a later example coded by Guido.
3041
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003042 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003043 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
3044 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
3045 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003046 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
3047 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
3048
3049 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
3050 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
3051 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
3052 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
3053 tzinfo subclass instance.
3054
3055 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
3056 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
3057 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
3058 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
3059 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
3060 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
3061 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
3062 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003063
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003064 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
3065 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3066 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3067 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3068 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003069 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3070
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003071 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003072
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003073 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3074 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3075 as a naive datetime object.
3076
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003077 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3078 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3079 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3080
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003081 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3082 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3083 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3084 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3085 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3086 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3087 comparison.
3088
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003089 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3090 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3091 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3092 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003093 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003094
3095 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003096
3097 and ::
3098
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003099 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3100
3101 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3102 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3103 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3104 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3105
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003106 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3107 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3108 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3109 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3110 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3111
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003112 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3113 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003114 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3115 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003116
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003117Library
3118-------
3119
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003120- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3121 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3122
3123- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3124 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3125 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3126 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3127 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3128 See PEP 307 for details.
3129
3130- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3131 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3132
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003133- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3134 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003135 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003136 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3137 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003138 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003139
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003140- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3141 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3142
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003143- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3144 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3145 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3146
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003147- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3148
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003149- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3150 exception.
3151
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003152- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3153 class.
3154
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003155- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3156 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3157 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3158
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003159- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3160 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3161
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003162- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003163 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3164 See SF bug #659228.
3165
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003166- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3167 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3168 See SF patch #651082.
3169
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003170- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003171
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003172- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3173 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3174
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003175- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003176 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003177
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003178- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3179 DOS paths from other platforms.
3180
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003181Tools/Demos
3182-----------
3183
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003184- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3185 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3186 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3187 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3188 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3189 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3190 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3191 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3192 example:
3193
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003194 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3195 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003196
3197 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3198
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003199
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003200Build
3201-----
3202
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003203- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3204 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3205 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003206 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3207
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003208 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3209
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003210- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3211 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3212 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3213 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3214 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3215 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3216 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3217 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3218 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3219
3220- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3221 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3222 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3223 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3224
3225- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3226 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3227
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003228C API
3229-----
3230
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003231- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3232 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003233
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003234- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3235 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3236 tp_as_number pointer.
3237
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003238- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3239 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3240 (SF #681367)
3241
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003242- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3243 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3244 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3245 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003246
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003247Tests
3248-----
3249
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003250- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003251 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3252 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3253 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3254 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3255 pydoc.)
3256
3257- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3258
3259- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003260
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003261Windows
3262-------
3263
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003264- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3265 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3266 time).
3267
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003268- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3269 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3270
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003271- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3272 release without strong cryptography.
3273
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003274- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003275 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003276
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003277- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3278 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3279
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003280Mac
3281---
3282
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003283- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3284 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003285
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003286- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3287 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3288 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003289
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003290- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3291 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003292
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003293- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3294 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3295 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3296 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003297
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003298- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003299 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3300 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3301 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003302
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003303
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003304What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003305=================================
3306
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003307*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003308
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003309Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003310--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003311
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003312- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3313
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003314- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3315 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003316 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003317 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003318 a different meaning than before.
3319
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003320- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003321 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003322 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003323
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003324- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003325 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003326 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003327
3328- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3329 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3330 and deallocation.
3331
3332- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3333 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3334
3335- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3336 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3337 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3338 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3339 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3340
3341- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3342 now detected by the garbage collector.
3343
3344- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3345 [SF bug 519621]
3346
3347- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3348 identifier.
3349
3350- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3351 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3352 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3353 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3354 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3355 [SF bug 563060]
3356
3357- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3358 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3359 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3360 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3361 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3362
3363- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3364 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3365 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3366
3367- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3368
3369- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3370 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3371 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3372 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3373 state of the slots would be lost.)
3374
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003375Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003376-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003377
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003378- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003379 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3380 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3381 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3382 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003383 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3384 Jython 2.1.
3385
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003386- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003387 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003388 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3389 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3390 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3391 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3392 these, see PEP 302.
3393
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003394- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3395 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3396 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3397
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003398- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3399 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3400 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3401
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003402- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3403 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3404 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3405
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003406- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3407 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3408 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3409 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3410 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3411 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3412 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3413 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3414 releases or implementations.
3415
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003416- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003417 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3418 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003419
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003420- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3421 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3422
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003423- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3424 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3425 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3426
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003427- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3428 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3429
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003430- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3431 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003432 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3433 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003434
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003435- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3436 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3437 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3438 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3439 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3440
3441 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3442 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3443 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3444 pattern.
3445
3446 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3447 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3448 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3449 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3450
3451 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3452 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3453 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3454 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3455 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3456 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3457
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003458- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3459 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3460 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3461 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3462 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3463 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3464 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3465 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003466
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003467- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3468 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3469 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3470 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3471 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003472 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3473 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3474 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3475 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3476 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3477 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3478 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003479
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003480- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3481 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3482
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003483- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3484 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3485 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3486 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3487 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3488 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3489 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3490 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3491 to Zack Weinberg!
3492
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003493- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3494 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3495 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3496 type. This has been fixed now.
3497
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003498- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3499 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3500 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3501
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003502- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3503 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3504 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3505 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3506 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3507 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3508 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3509 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003510 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003511
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003512- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3513 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3514 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003515
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003516- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3517 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3518 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3519 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3520 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3521 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3522 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3523 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003524 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003525 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3526 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3527
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003528- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3529 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3530 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3531 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3532 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3533 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3534 this.)
3535
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003536- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3537 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003538 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003539 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003540 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3541 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003542 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3543 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003544
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003545- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3546 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3547 currently running.
3548
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003549- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3550 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3551 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3552 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3553
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003554- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3555 as directory names.
3556
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003557- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3558 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3559
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003560- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3561 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3562
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003563- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003564 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3565 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003566
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003567- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3568 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3569 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3570 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3571 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3572
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003573- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3574 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3575 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3576 removed.
3577
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003578- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3579 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3580 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3581
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003582- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3583 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3584 to __debug__.
3585
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003586- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3587 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3588 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3589
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003590- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3591 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3592 deprecated now.
3593
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003594- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3595 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3596 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003597
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003598- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3599 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3600 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3601 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3602 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003603
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003604- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3605 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3606
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003607- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3608 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3609 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003610 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003611 is backward compatible.
3612
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003613- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3614 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3615 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3616 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3617 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3618
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003619- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3620 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3621 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3622 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3623 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3624 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003625
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003626- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3627 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3628
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003629- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3630 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3631
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003632- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3633 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3634 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3635 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3636 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3637
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003638- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3639 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3640 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3641
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003642- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003643 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3644
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003645- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3646 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3647 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003648
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003649- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3650 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3651
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003652- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3653 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3654 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3655
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003656- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3657
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003658Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003659-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003660
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003661- Added three operators to the operator module:
3662 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3663 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3664 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3665
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003666- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3667
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003668- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3669 archives.
3670
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003671- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3672 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3673 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3674
3675 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3676
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003677- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3678 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3679 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003680 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003681
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003682- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3683 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3684 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3685 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003686 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3687 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3688 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3689 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003690
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003691- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3692 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003693
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003694- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3695
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003696- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3697 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3698
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003699- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3700 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3701 supported.
3702
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003703- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3704
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003705- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3706 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003707
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003708- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3709 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3710
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003711- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3712
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003713- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3714 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3715
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003716- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3717 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3718 functions but callable type objects.
3719
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003720- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003721 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003722 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003723
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003724- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3725 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003726
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003727- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3728 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003729
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003730- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3731 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3732 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3733 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3734
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003735- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3736 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003737
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003738- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3739 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3740 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3741 and __imul__.
3742
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003743- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003744 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3745 is called.
3746
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003747- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3748 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3749 interpreter was compiled.
3750
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003751- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3752 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3753 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003754 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003755 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3756 1, not 2.
3757
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003758- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3759 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3760 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3761 limit.
3762
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003763- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3764 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3765 bug #623464.
3766
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003767- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3768 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3769 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3770 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3771
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003772Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003773-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003774
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003775- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3776
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003777- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3778 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3779 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3780 with Python 2.3a2.
3781
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003782- os.path exposes getctime.
3783
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003784- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003785 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003786 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003787 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003788 unit tests of floating point results.
3789
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003790- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3791 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3792 has been increased.
3793
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003794- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3795 executed.
3796
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003797- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3798 postinstallation script.
3799
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003800- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3801 test the current module.
3802
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003803- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003804 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3805 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3806 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3807 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3808
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003809- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003810 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003811 Ward's Optik package.
3812
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003813- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3814 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3815 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3816 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3817
3818- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3819 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003820 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003821
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003822- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3823 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3824 shelf are binary pickles.
3825
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003826- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3827 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3828
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003829- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3830 modules are iterators now.
3831
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003832- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3833 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3834 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3835 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3836 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3837 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003838
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003839- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3840 with their entity value.
3841
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003842- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3843
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003844- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3845 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003846
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003847- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3848 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003849 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003850
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003851- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3852 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3853 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3854 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3855 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3856 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3857 main():
3858
3859 import locale
3860 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3861
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003862- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3863 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3864
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003865- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3866 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3867 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3868 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3869 to the new standard.
3870
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003871- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3872 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3873 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3874 an extension to the database.
3875
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003876- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3877 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3878 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3879 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003880 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003881
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003882- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003883 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003884
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003885- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3886 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3887 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3888 bounded integers.
3889
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003890- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3891 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3892 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3893 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3894 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3895 in existence.
3896
3897 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3898 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3899 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3900 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3901 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3902 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3903
3904 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3905 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3906 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3907 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3908
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003909- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3910 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3911 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3912
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003913- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3914
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003915- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3916 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3917 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3918 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3919
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003920- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3921 argument.
3922
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003923- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3924 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3925 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3926 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3927 [SF patch 560794].
3928
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003929- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3930 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3931 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003932 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3933 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3934 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003935
3936- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3937 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003938
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003939- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3940 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3941 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3942 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003943
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003944- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3945 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3946 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3947 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3948 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3949
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003950- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003951
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003952- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3953
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003954- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3955 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3956 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3957 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3958 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3959 identical to None.
3960
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003961- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3962 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3963 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3964 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3965 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3966 results now.
3967
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003968- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3969 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3970
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003971- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3972 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3973 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3974 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3975 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3976 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3977 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3978 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3979
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003980- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3981
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003982- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3983 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3984
3985- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3986 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3987 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3988 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3989 and other systems.
3990
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003991- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3992 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3993 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3994 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 +00003995 work well with these.
3996
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003997- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3998
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003999- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00004000 connections.
4001
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00004002- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
4003 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
4004 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
4005
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00004006- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
4007 sets
4008
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00004009- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
4010 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
4011 name.
4012
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00004013- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
4014 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
4015 passed in.
4016
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004017- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00004018 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00004019 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
4020 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00004021
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00004022- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
4023
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00004024- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
4025
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00004026- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
4027 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
4028 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
4029
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004030- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
4031 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
4032 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
4033 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00004034 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004035
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004036- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004037 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004038 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004039
4040- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
4041 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
4042 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
4043
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004044- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00004045 the value of its expression argument.
4046
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004047- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
4048 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
4049 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
4050
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00004051- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
4052 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
4053 skipstone browser was included.
4054
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00004055- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
4056 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
4057
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004058Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004059-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004060
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00004061- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
4062 names in addition to accepting file names.
4063
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00004064- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
4065 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4066 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4067 still used and useful.)
4068
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004069- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4070 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4071 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4072 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004073
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004074- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4075 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4076 the generated binary.
4077
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004078Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004079-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004080
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004081- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4082
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004083- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4084 except in the hands of experts.
4085
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004086- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004087 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4088 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4089 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004090
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004091- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4092 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4093 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4094 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4095 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4096 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4097 builds.
4098
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004099- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4100 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4101 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4102 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4103 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4104 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4105 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4106 new type.
4107
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004108- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004109
4110 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4111 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4112 positive infinities.
4113
4114 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4115 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4116 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4117 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4118 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4119 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4120 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4121
4122 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4123
4124 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4125
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004126- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4127 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4128 size of the executable.
4129
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004130- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4131 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4132 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4133 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004134
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004135- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4136
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004137- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4138 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4139 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004140
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004141- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4142 well as Unix.
4143
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004144- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4145 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4146 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4147 modules in the README file for details.
4148
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004149C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004150-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004151
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004152- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4153 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004154 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004155 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004156 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004157
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004158- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4159 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4160 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4161 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4162 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4163 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004164 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004165 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4166 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4167 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4168 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4169 aligned.)
4170
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004171- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4172 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4173 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4174
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004175- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4176 level.
4177
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004178- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4179 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4180 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4181 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4182 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4183
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004184- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4185 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4186 code.
4187
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004188- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4189 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4190 adjusting for negative indices.
4191
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004192- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4193 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4194 object.
4195
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004196- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4197 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4198 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4199
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004200- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4201 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004202
4203- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4204
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004205- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4206 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4207 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4208 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4209
4210- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4211
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004212- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004213
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004214- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004215 without going through the buffer API.
4216
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004217- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004218
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004219- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4220 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4221 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4222 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4223
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004224- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4225 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4226
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004227- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004228 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4229
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004230New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004231-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004232
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004233- OpenVMS is now supported.
4234
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004235- AtheOS is now supported.
4236
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004237- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4238
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004239- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4240
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004241Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004242-----
4243
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004244- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4245 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4246 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004247
4248Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004249-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004250
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004251- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4252 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4253 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4254 bugs.
4255 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004256 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004257 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4258 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004259 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004260
4261- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004262 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004263
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004264- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4265 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4266
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004267- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4268 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004269 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004270 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4271
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004272- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4273 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4274 use files" uninstall option).
4275
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004276- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4277
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004278- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4279 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4280
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004281- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4282 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4283 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4284
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004285- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4286 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4287 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4288 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4289 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004290 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4291 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4292 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004293
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004294- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004295 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004296 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4297 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4298 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4299 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4300 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4301 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4302 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4303 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4304 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4305 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4306 work around.
4307
4308- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4309 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4310 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4311 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4312 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4313 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4314 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4315 specified with O_CREAT too).
4316
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004317Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004318----
4319
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004320- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004321
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004322- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4323 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4324 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4325
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004326- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4327 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4328 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4329
4330- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4331 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4332 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4333 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4334 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4335 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4336 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4337 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004338
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004339- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4340 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4341 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004342
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004343- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4344 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4345 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4346 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4347 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004348
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004349- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4350 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4351 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004352
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004353- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4354 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004355
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004356- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4357 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4358 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4359 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4360 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004361
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004362- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4363 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4364 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4365
4366- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4367 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4368 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004369
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004370- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4371 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4372 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4373 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004374 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004375
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004376- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4377 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004378
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004379- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4380 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004381
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004382- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004383 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004384 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4385 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004386
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004387
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004388What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004389===============================
4390
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004391*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4392
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004393Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004394--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004395
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004396- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4397 with a custom metaclass.
4398
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004399Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004400-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004401
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004402- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4403 are proxies.
4404
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004405Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004406-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004407
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004408- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4409 very short strings.
4410
4411- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4412 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4413 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4414 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4415 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4416
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004417Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004418-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004419
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004420- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4421 close or delete time).
4422
4423- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4424 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4425
4426- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4427
4428- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004429 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004430
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004431Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004432-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004433
4434Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004435-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004436
4437C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004438-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004439
4440New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004441-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004442
4443Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004444-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004445
4446Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004447-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004448
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004449- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4450
4451- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4452 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4453
4454- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4455 deleted at process exit time.
4456
4457- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4458 in backslash.
4459
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004460Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004461----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004462
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004463- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4464 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4465 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4466
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004467
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004468What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004469===========================
4470
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004471*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4472
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004473Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004474--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004475
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004476- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4477 been extensively updated. See
4478
4479 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4480
4481 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4482
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004483- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4484 deleted!
4485
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004486- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4487 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4488 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4489 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4490 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4491
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004492- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4493
4494 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4495 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4496
4497 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4498 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4499 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4500 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4501 supported anyway.
4502
4503 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4504 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4505
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004506- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4507 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4508 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4509 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4510 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004511
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004512- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4513 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4514 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4515
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004516Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004517-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004518
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004519- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4520 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4521 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4522 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4523 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4524 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004525 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4526 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4527 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4528 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004529
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004530- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4531 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4532 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4533
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004534Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004535-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004536
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004537- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4538
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004539Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004540-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004541
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004542- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4543 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4544 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4545 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4546 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4547 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4548
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004549- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4550
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004551- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4552
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004553- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4554
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004555- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4556 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4557 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4558
4559- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4560
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004561Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004562-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004563
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004564- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4565 off a search on Google.
4566
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004567Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004568-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004569
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004570- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4571 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4572 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4573 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4574 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4575 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4576 other platforms should do likewise.
4577
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004578- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4579 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4580 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4581
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004582C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004583-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004584
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004585- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4586 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4587 producing key-value pairs.
4588
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004589- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004590 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004591 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4592 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4593 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4594 previously went unchallenged.
4595
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004596New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004597-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004598
4599Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004600-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004601
4602Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004603-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004604
4605Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004606----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004607
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004608- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4609 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004610
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004611- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4612 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4613 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4614 home.
4615
4616
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004617What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004618===========================
4619
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004620*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4621
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004622Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004623--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004624
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004625- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4626 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004627
4628 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004629 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004630
4631 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4632 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004633 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004634 This needs to be documented.
4635
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004636- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4637 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4638
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004639- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4640 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4641 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4642
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004643- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4644 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4645
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004646- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4647 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4648 class forbids it).
4649
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004650- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4651 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4652 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4653
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004654- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4655
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004656Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004657-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004658
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004659- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4660 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004661 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004662
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004663- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4664 (like 1 + '').
4665
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004666Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004667-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004668
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004669- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4670 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4671 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4672 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004673 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004674 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4675
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004676- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4677 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4678 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4679 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4680
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004681- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4682 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004683 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4684 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4685 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004686
4687- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4688 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004689
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004690- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4691 bytes on its input.
4692
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004693Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004694-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004695
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004696- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004697 convenience function.
4698
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004699- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4700 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4701 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004702 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4703 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4704 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4705 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4706 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4707 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004708
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004709- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4710 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4711 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4712 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4713
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004714- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4715 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4716 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4717
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004718- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4719 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4720 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4721 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4722
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004723- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4724 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004725 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004726 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4727 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4728 new -l and -e options.
4729
4730- statcache is now deprecated.
4731
4732- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4733 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004734 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004735 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4736 time properly taken into account.
4737
4738- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4739 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4740 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4741 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4742
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004743Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004744-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004745
4746Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004747-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004748
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004749- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4750 is built with libdb3 if available.
4751
4752- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4753
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004754C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004755-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004756
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004757- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4758 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4759 PySequence_Size().
4760
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004761- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4762
4763- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4764 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4765 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4766
4767- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4768 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4769
4770- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4771 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4772
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004773New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004774-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004775
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004776- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4777 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4778
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004779- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4780 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4781
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004782- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4783
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004784Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004785-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004786
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004787- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4788 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4789
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004790Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004791-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004792
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004793Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004794----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004795
4796- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4797 removed completely in the next release.
4798
4799- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4800 OSX.
4801
4802- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4803 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4804
4805- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4806
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004807
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004808What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004809===========================
4810
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004811*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4812
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004813Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004814--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004815
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004816- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004817 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004818 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004819 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4820 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004821 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4822 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004823 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4824 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004825
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004826- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4827 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4828
4829- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4830 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4831
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004832Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004833-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004834
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004835- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4836 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4837 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4838 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4839 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4840 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4841 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4842 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4843
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004844- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4845 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4846 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4847 example).
4848
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004849- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004850 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004851 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004852 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004853
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004854- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4855 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4856 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004857 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004858
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004859- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4860 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4861 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4862 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4863 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4864 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4865
4866 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4867
4868 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4869
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004870Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004871-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004872
4873- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4874
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004875- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4876
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004877- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4878 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004879
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004880- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4881 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4882 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4883 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4884 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4885 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004886 attributes.
4887
4888- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4889 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4890 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004891
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004892- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4893 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4894 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004895
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004896- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4897 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4898 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004899 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4900 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4901
4902- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4903 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004904
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004905Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004906-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004907
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004908- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4909 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4910
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004911- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4912 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4913 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4914 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4915
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004916- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4917 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4918 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4919 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4920
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004921 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4922 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4923 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4924 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4925 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4926 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4927 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4928 without losing information).
4929
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004930- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004931 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4932 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4933 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4934 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4935 module).
4936
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004937 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004938 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4939 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4940 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4941 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004942
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004943- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004944 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4945 encoding.
4946
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004947- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4948 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4949
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004950- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004951 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4952
4953- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4954 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4955 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4956 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4957
4958- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4959
4960- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4961 ON, and OFF.
4962
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004963- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4964 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4965
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004966Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004967-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004968
4969- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4970 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4971 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004972
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004973- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4974 been added: -X and -E.
4975
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004976Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004977-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004978
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004979- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4980 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4981
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004982C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004983-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004984
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004985- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4986 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4987 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4988 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4989 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4990
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004991- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4992 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4993 as long) arguments.
4994
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004995- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4996 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4997 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4998 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4999 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
5000 report any bugs or strange behavior).
5001
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005002- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
5003 input.
5004
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005005New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005006-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005007
5008Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005009-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005010
5011Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005012-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005013
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00005014- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
5015 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
5016 is created for .py and .pyw files.
5017
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005018- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
5019 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
5020 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005021 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005022
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005023 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
5024 # (SIGINT) behavior.
5025 import signal
5026 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005027
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005028 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005029 while 1:
5030 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005031 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005032 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
5033 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
5034 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
5035 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005036
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005037
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005038What's New in Python 2.2a4?
5039===========================
5040
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005041*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
5042
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005043Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005044--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005045
5046- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
5047 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
5048 documentation for all operations on list objects.
5049
5050- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
5051 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
5052 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
5053 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
5054 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
5055 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
5056 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005057
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005058- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005059 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005060 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
5061 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
5062 associate a docstring with a property.
5063
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005064- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
5065 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5066 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5067 other built-in object types.
5068
5069- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5070 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5071 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5072 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5073 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5074
5075- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5076 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5077
5078- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5079 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005080 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005081 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5082 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5083 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5084 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5085 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5086
5087- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5088 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5089 class.
5090
5091- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5092 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5093 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5094 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5095
5096- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5097 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5098 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5099 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5100
5101- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5102 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5103
5104- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5105 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5106 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5107 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5108 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005109 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005110 with the same value as s.
5111
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005112- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5113
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005114Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005115----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005116
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005117- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5118
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005119- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5120 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5121 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5122 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5123 objects.
5124
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005125- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5126 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005127 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5128 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5129
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005130- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5131 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5132 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5133
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005134Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005135-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005136
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005137- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5138 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5139 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5140 by the instances.
5141
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005142- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5143 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5144 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5145
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005146- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5147 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5148 before the entire comparison is complete.
5149
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005150- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5151 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5152 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5153
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005154- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5155 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5156 getwriter().
5157
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005158- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5159 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5160
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005161- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005162 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5163 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5164
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005165- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5166 iterable object.
5167
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005168- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5169 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005170
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005171- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5172 authentication.
5173
5174- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5175 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005176
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005177- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005178 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5179 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5180 a sample driver.)
5181
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005182Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005183-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005184
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005185- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5186 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5187 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5188 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5189 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5190 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5191 kernel has large file support.
5192
5193- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5194 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5195 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5196 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5197 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5198
5199- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5200 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5201 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5202
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005203C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005204-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005205
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005206- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5207 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5208
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005209New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005210-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005211
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005212- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5213 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5214
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005215Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005216-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005217
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005218- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5219 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5220 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5221 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5222 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5223
5224- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5225 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5226 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5227 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5228
5229- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5230 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5231
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005232Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005233-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005234
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005235- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005236 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5237 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005238
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005239
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005240What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5241===========================
5242
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005243*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5244
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005245Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005246----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005247
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005248- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5249 big to represent as a C double.
5250
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005251- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5252 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5253 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5254 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5255 restriction).
5256
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005257- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5258 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5259 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5260 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5261 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5262
5263 >>> dir([])
5264 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5265 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5266 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5267 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5268 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5269 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5270 'reverse', 'sort']
5271
5272 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5273
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005274- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005275 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5276 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5277 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5278 OverflowError exception.
5279
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005280- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005281 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005282 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5283 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5284 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5285 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5286 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005287 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005288 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5289 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5290
5291 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5292 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5293 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5294 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005295
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005296- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005297 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5298 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5299 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5300 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5301 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5302 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5303 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5304 once it is created.
5305
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005306- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5307 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5308 (key, value) pairs.
5309
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005310- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005311 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5312 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5313
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005314- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5315 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5316 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5317 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5318 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005319
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005320- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005321 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5322 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5323
5324 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5325
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005326- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005327 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5328
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005329Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005330-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005331
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005332- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005333 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5334 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005335
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005336- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5337 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5338 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5339 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5340 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5341 in this area anymore).
5342
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005343- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5344 threading.Timer.
5345
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005346- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5347 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5348
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005349- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005350 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5351
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005352- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005353 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5354 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5355 converted to Python longs.
5356
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005357- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005358 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5359
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005360- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5361 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5362 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5363
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005364Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005365-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005366
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005367- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5368 division operators as per PEP 238.
5369
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005370Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005371-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005372
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005373- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5374 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5375 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5376 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5377
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005378C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005379-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005380
5381- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005382
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005383- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5384 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005385 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005386
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005387 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5388 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005389 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005390 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005391
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005392- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005393 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5394 module:
5395
5396 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005397
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005398 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5399 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005400
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005401 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5402 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005403
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005404 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5405
5406 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5407
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005408- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005409 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5410 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5411 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005412
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005413New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005414-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005415
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005416- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5417 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5418 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5419 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5420 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005421
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005422Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005423-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005424
5425Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005426-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005427
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005428- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5429 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5430 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5431 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005432 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5433 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5434 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5435 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5436 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005437
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005438- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005439 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5440
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005441
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005442What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5443===========================
5444
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005445*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5446
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005447Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005448-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005449
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005450- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5451 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5452
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005453- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5454 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5455 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005456
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005457- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5458 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5459 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5460 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005461
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005462- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5463
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005464- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005465
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005466Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005467-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005468
5469- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005470 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005471 the module docstring for details.
5472
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005473Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005474-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005475
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005476- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005477 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5478 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5479 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005480
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005481- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5482 Nick Mathewson.
5483
5484Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005485----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005486
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005487- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5488 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5489 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5490 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5491 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5492 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5493 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5494 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5495
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005496- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5497 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5498 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5499 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5500
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005501- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5502 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5503 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5504 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5505 come a long way).
5506
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005507- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5508 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5509 write filters for these warnings).
5510
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005511- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5512 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5513 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5514 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5515 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5516
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005517- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5518 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5519 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5520 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5521 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5522 older distribution.
5523
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005524Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005525-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005526
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005527- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5528 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005529 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005530
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005531- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5532 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5533 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5534
5535- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5536
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005537- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5538
5539- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5540
5541- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5542
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005543- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005544
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005545- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5546
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005547New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005548-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005549
5550C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005551-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005552
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005553- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5554 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5555 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5556 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5557 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5558 against buffer overruns.
5559
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005560- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005561 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5562 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005563 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5564 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5565 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5566
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005567- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5568 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5569 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5570 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5571 deprecated.
5572
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005573Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005574-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005575
5576- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5577 relevant is found.
5578
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005579
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005580What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005581===========================
5582
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005583*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5584
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005585Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005586----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005587
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005588- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5589 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5590 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5591 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5592 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5593 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5594 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5595 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005596 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005597 repaired.
5598
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005599- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005600 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005601 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5602 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5603 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5604 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5605 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5606 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5607 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5608 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5609
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005610- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5611 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5612 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5613 leading BMO character).
5614
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005615- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5616 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5617 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5618
5619 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5620 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5621 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005622
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005623 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5624 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5625 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5626 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5627 for various simple to use conversions.
5628
5629 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5630 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5631
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005632 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5633 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5634 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5635 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5636 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5637 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5638 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5639 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5640 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5641 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5642 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5643 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5644 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5645 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5646 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005647
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005648- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5649 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5650 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005651 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005652 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005653
5654 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005655 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5656 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5657 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5658 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5659 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005660 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5661 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005662
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005663 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5664 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5665 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005666 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005667
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005668- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5669 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5670 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5671 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5672 floating arithmetic,
5673
5674 x = 9007199254740992.0
5675 print long(x)
5676
5677 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5678 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5679 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5680 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5681 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5682 functions are of good quality).
5683
5684 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5685 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5686 algorithms to break.
5687
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005688- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5689 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5690 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5691 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5692 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5693 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5694 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5695 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5696 order.
5697
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005698- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5699 operation along the most common code paths.
5700
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005701- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5702 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5703
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005704- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5705 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5706 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5707 {}.update(UserDict())
5708
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005709- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5710 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5711 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5712 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5713 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5714 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5715 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5716 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5717
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005718- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005719 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005720
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005721 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005722 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5723 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005724 join() method of strings
5725 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005726 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5727 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005728 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005729 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005730
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005731- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5732 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5733
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005734- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5735 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5736
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005737- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5738 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5739 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5740 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5741
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005742- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5743 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005744 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005745 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5746 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005747
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005748- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5749
5750
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005751Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005752-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005753
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005754- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005755 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005756 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5757 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5758
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005759- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5760 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5761
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005762- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5763 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5764 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5765 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5766
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005767- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5768 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5769 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5770
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005771- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5772
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005773- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5774
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005775- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5776 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5777 that are still imported into string.py).
5778
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005779- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5780
5781- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5782 Now it does.
5783
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005784- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5785
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005786- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5787 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5788 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5789 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5790 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005791 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5792 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005793
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005794- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5795 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5796 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5797 'help(object)'.
5798
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005799Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005800-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005801
5802- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005803 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005804 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5805 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5806
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005807- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005808 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5809 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005810
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005811C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005812-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005813
5814- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5815 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005816
5817----
5818
5819**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**