blob: 47bb57aad7b0457a8c3b26e449e35097870d2513 [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
Martin v. Löwis18e16552006-02-15 17:27:45 +000015- PEP 353: Using ssize_t as the index type.
16
Neal Norwitzfc76d632006-01-10 06:03:13 +000017- Patch #1400181, fix unicode string formatting to not use the locale.
18 This is how string objects work. u'%f' could use , instead of .
19 for the decimal point. Now both strings and unicode always use periods.
20
Neal Norwitz671b9e32006-01-09 07:07:12 +000021- Bug #1244610, #1392915, fix build problem on OpenBSD 3.7 and 3.8.
22 configure would break checking curses.h.
23
Georg Brandlcd4d1e82005-12-27 17:37:07 +000024- Bug #959576: The pwd module is now builtin. This allows Python to be
25 built on UNIX platforms without $HOME set.
26
Neal Norwitzc10978f2005-12-19 06:07:16 +000027- Bug #1072182, fix some potential problems if characters are signed.
28
Neal Norwitz5d0ad502005-12-19 04:27:42 +000029- Bug #889500, fix line number on SyntaxWarning for global declarations.
30
Neal Norwitzdb83eb32005-12-18 05:29:30 +000031- Bug #1378022, UTF-8 files with a leading BOM crashed the interpreter.
32
Neal Norwitze7214a12005-12-18 05:03:17 +000033- Support for converting hex strings to floats no longer works.
34 This was not portable. float('0x3') now raises a ValueError.
35
Barry Warsaw2a38a862005-12-18 01:27:35 +000036- Patch #1382163: Expose Subversion revision number to Python. New C API
37 function Py_GetBuildNumber(). New attribute sys.build_number. Build number
38 is now displayed in interactive prompt banner.
39
Georg Brandlfa166682005-12-17 21:45:17 +000040- Implementation of PEP 341 - Unification of try/except and try/finally.
41 "except" clauses can now be written together with a "finally" clause in
Neal Norwitz11ca77e2005-12-17 22:24:12 +000042 one try statement instead of two nested ones. Patch #1355913.
Georg Brandlfa166682005-12-17 21:45:17 +000043
Hye-Shik Chang835b2432005-12-17 04:38:31 +000044- Bug #1379994: Builtin unicode_escape and raw_unicode_escape codec
45 now encodes backslash correctly.
46
Martin v. Löwisb45b3152005-11-28 17:34:23 +000047- Patch #1350409: Work around signal handling bug in Visual Studio 2005.
48
Georg Brandlf06e30a2005-11-24 15:37:42 +000049- Bug #1281408: Py_BuildValue now works correct even with unsigned longs
50 and long longs.
51
Neal Norwitz67715f02005-11-09 06:59:35 +000052- SF Bug #1350188, "setdlopenflags" leads to crash upon "import"
53 It was possible dlerror() returns a NULL pointer, use a default error
54 message in this case.
55
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +000056- Replaced most Unicode charmap codecs with new ones using the
57 new Unicode translate string feature in the builtin charmap
58 codec; the codecs were created from the mapping tables available
59 at ftp.unicode.org and contain a few updates (e.g. the Mac OS
60 encodings now include a mapping for the Apple logo)
61
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +000062- Added a few more codecs for Mac OS encodings
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +000063
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +000064- Speed up some Unicode operations.
65
66- A new AST parser implementation was completed.
67
Neal Norwitzb6570f52005-10-21 06:26:10 +000068- SF bug #1167751: fix incorrect code being for generator expressions.
Neal Norwitz16af7342005-10-21 06:25:33 +000069 The following code now raises a SyntaxError: foo(a = i for i in range(10))
70
Neal Norwitz708e51a2005-10-03 04:48:15 +000071- SF Bug #976608: fix SystemError when mtime of an imported file is -1.
72
Neal Norwitz11bd1192005-10-03 00:54:56 +000073- SF Bug #887946: fix segfault when redirecting stdin from a directory.
74 Provide a warning when a directory is passed on the command line.
75
Neal Norwitz40d37812005-10-02 01:48:49 +000076- Fix segfault with invalid coding.
77
78- SF bug #772896: unknown encoding results in MemoryError.
79
Raymond Hettinger6b27cda2005-09-24 21:23:05 +000080- All iterators now have a Boolean value of true. Formerly, some iterators
81 supported a __len__() method which evaluated to False when the iterator
82 was empty.
83
Guido van Rossum630db602005-09-20 18:49:54 +000084- On 64-bit platforms, when __len__() returns a value that cannot be
85 represented as a C int, raise OverflowError.
86
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000087- test__locale is skipped on OS X < 10.4 (only partial locale support is
Walter Dörwald6611a8b2005-10-09 19:28:35 +000088 present).
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000089
Georg Brandl80bbf3f2005-09-14 19:38:29 +000090- SF bug #893549: parsing keyword arguments was broken with a few format
91 codes.
92
Guido van Rossum8ee3e5a2005-09-14 18:09:42 +000093- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on AIX 5.3
94 with IBM's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1284289). This also closes SF
95 bug #105470: test_pwd fails on 64bit system (Opteron).
96
Guido van Rossum539c6622005-09-14 17:49:54 +000097- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on HP-UX 11 on
98 Itanium2 with HP's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1225212).
99
Georg Brandl4550b8d2005-08-26 06:43:52 +0000100- Disallow keyword arguments for type constructors that don't use them
Georg Brandl02c42872005-08-26 06:42:30 +0000101 (fixes bug #1119418).
102
Martin v. Löwisd35edda2005-08-24 08:39:24 +0000103- Forward UnicodeDecodeError into SyntaxError for source encoding errors.
104
Barry Warsawe2eca0b2005-08-15 18:14:19 +0000105- SF bug #900092: When tracing (e.g. for hotshot), restore 'return' events for
106 exceptions that cause a function to exit.
107
Raymond Hettinger9f1a6792005-07-31 01:16:36 +0000108- The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
109 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
110 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
111
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +0000112- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
113
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +0000114- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
115 reference counts in some error exit cases.
116
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000117- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
118 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
119 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
120 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
121 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
122 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
123 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
124 realloc.
125
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +0000126- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
127 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
128
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +0000129- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
130 like their int counterparts.
131
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +0000132- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
133 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
134 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
135 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
136 for a longer write-up of the problem).
137
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +0000138- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
139 serializing floats.
140
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +0000141- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
142 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
143 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
144
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +0000145- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
146 278.
147
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000148- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
149 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
150 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
151 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000152 to the base class has been moved to the proper nb_* magic slot and out of
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000153 PyNumber_*().
154 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
155
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +0000156- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
157 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
158 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
159 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
160
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +0000161- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
162 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
163 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
164 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
165 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
166
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +0000167- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
168 disabled caused a crash.
169
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000170- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
171 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
172
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000173- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +0000174 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
175
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +0000176- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
177
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000178- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +0000179 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
180 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
181 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000182
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +0000183- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
184
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +0000185- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
186 returning None.
187
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000188- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +0000189 ('\') with a specific error message.
190
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +0000191- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
192
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +0000193- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
194 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
195
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000196- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000197 an ferror() call.
198
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000199- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
200 list.sort().
201
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000202- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
203 (2+3) --> (5).
204
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000205- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
206
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000207- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
208 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000209
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000210- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
211 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
212 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
213
Neil Schemenauercf52c072005-08-12 17:34:58 +0000214- Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a
215 unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and
216 calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance.
217
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000218Extension Modules
219-----------------
220
Georg Brandlf4f44152006-02-18 22:29:33 +0000221- Patch #1393157: os.startfile() now has an optional argument to specify
222 a "command verb" to invoke on the file.
223
Neal Norwitz082b2df2006-02-07 07:04:46 +0000224- Bug #876637, prevent stack corruption when socket descriptor
225 is larger than FD_SETSIZE.
226
Neal Norwitz0e6bc8c2006-02-05 05:45:43 +0000227- Patch #1407135, bug #1424041: harmonize mmap behavior of anonymous memory.
228 mmap.mmap(-1, size) now returns anonymous memory in both Unix and Windows.
229 mmap.mmap(0, size) should not be used on Windows for anonymous memory.
230
Martin v. Löwis57a34e82006-02-04 19:12:37 +0000231- Patch #1422385: The nis module now supports access to domains other
232 than the system default domain.
233
Martin v. Löwis14694662006-02-03 12:54:16 +0000234- Use Win32 API to implement os.stat/fstat. As a result, subsecond timestamps
235 are reported, the limit on path name lengths is removed, and stat reports
236 WindowsError now (instead of OSError).
237
Gregory P. Smithcfc4a8d2006-01-29 19:46:23 +0000238- Add bsddb.db.DBEnv.set_tx_timestamp allowing time based database recovery.
239
Neal Norwitz62a21122006-01-25 05:21:55 +0000240- Bug #1413192, fix seg fault in bsddb if a transaction was deleted
241 before the env.
242
Martin v. Löwis11017b12006-01-14 18:12:57 +0000243- Patch #1103116: Basic AF_NETLINK support.
244
Neal Norwitz3b4fff82006-01-11 08:54:45 +0000245- Bug #1402308, (possible) segfault when using mmap.mmap(-1, ...)
246
Neal Norwitz88bbd732006-01-10 07:05:44 +0000247- Bug #1400822, _curses over{lay,write} doesn't work when passing 6 ints.
248 Also fix ungetmouse() which did not accept arguments properly.
249 The code now conforms to the documented signature.
250
Neal Norwitz5e3d8622006-01-09 06:24:35 +0000251- Bug #1400115, Fix segfault when calling curses.panel.userptr()
252 without prior setting of the userptr.
253
Neal Norwitz40c6b472006-01-05 05:43:35 +0000254- Fix 64-bit problems in bsddb.
255
Neal Norwitz8856fb72005-12-18 03:34:22 +0000256- Patch #1365916: fix some unsafe 64-bit mmap methods.
257
Hye-Shik Changc5c57e62005-12-12 11:48:32 +0000258- Bug #1290333: Added a workaround for cjkcodecs' _codecs_cn build
259 problem on AIX.
260
Georg Brandla13c2442005-11-22 19:30:31 +0000261- Bug #869197: os.setgroups rejects long integer arguments
262
Neal Norwitz0f46bbf2005-11-03 05:00:25 +0000263- Bug #1346533, select.poll() doesn't raise an error if timeout > sys.maxint
264
Neal Norwitz7b631792005-11-02 05:26:07 +0000265- Bug #1344508, Fix UNIX mmap leaking file descriptors
266
Neal Norwitzf3396542005-10-28 05:52:22 +0000267- Patch #1338314, Bug #1336623: fix tarfile so it can extract
268 REGTYPE directories from tarfiles written by old programs.
269
Gregory P. Smithe101df92006-01-24 20:09:45 +0000270- Patch #1407992, fixes broken bsddb module db associate when using
271 BerkeleyDB 3.3, 4.0 or 4.1.
272
273- Get bsddb module to build with BerkeleyDB version 4.4
274
275- Get bsddb module to build with BerkeleyDB version 3.2
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +0000276
Neal Norwitz484d9a42005-09-30 04:46:49 +0000277- Patch #1309009, Fix segfault in pyexpat when the XML document is in latin_1,
278 but Python incorrectly assumes it is in UTF-8 format
279
Georg Brandle677adc2005-09-29 13:40:49 +0000280- Fix parse errors in the readline module when compiling without threads.
281
Hye-Shik Chang9ceebd52005-09-24 14:58:47 +0000282- Patch #1288833: Removed thread lock from socket.getaddrinfo on
283 FreeBSD 5.3 and later versions which got thread-safe getaddrinfo(3).
284
Michael W. Hudson10402a32005-09-22 09:19:01 +0000285- Patches #1298449 and #1298499: Add some missing checks for error
286 returns in cStringIO.c.
287
Neal Norwitz058bde12005-09-21 06:44:25 +0000288- Patch #1297028: fix segfault if call type on MultibyteCodec,
289 MultibyteStreamReader, or MultibyteStreamWriter
290
Neal Norwitzcfe7dd92005-09-19 06:49:27 +0000291- Fix memory leak in posix.access().
292
Martin v. Löwis8b291e22005-09-18 08:17:56 +0000293- Patch #1213831: Fix typo in unicodedata._getcode.
294
Georg Brandlfb1ef852005-09-14 20:53:32 +0000295- Bug #1007046: os.startfile() did not accept unicode strings encoded in
296 the file system encoding.
297
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000298- Patch #756021: Special-case socket.inet_aton('255.255.255.255') for
299 platforms that don't have inet_aton().
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000300
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000301- Bug #1215928: Fix bz2.BZ2File.seek() for 64-bit file offsets.
302
303- Bug #1191043: Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines for files containing one
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000304 line without newlines.
305
Georg Brandl38387b82005-08-24 07:17:40 +0000306- Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did
307 on Windows.
308
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000309- Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
Martin v. Löwisebd9d5b2005-08-09 15:00:59 +0000310 st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
311
Michael W. Hudson8137bea2005-07-27 20:24:40 +0000312- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
313 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
314 for large or negative values.
315
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000316- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000317 implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false.
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000318
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000319- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
320
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000321- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
322 if available on the platform.
323
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000324- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
325 available on the platform.
326
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000327- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
328 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
329
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000330- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
331
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000332- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
333 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
334 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
335
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000336- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
337
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000338- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
339 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
340
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000341- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000342 file size.
343
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000344- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
345
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000346- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
347 {remove_history,replace_history}
348
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000349- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
350 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000351
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000352- stat_float_times is now True.
353
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000354- array.array objects are now picklable.
355
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000356- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
357 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
358
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000359- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
360 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
361 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
362
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000363- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
364 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000365
366Library
367-------
368
Georg Brandle4662172006-02-19 09:51:27 +0000369- Patch #1337756: fileinput now accepts Unicode filenames.
370
Georg Brandl7b4e7c22006-02-18 21:10:56 +0000371- Patch #1373643: The chunk module can now read chunks larger than
372 two gigabytes.
373
Georg Brandl21dd1af2006-02-17 13:35:13 +0000374- Patch #1417555: SimpleHTTPServer now returns Last-Modified headers.
375
Georg Brandlbd3bc4d2006-02-17 09:52:53 +0000376- Bug #1430298: It is now possible to send a mail with an empty
377 return address using smtplib.
378
Georg Brandl0e1abe22006-02-17 09:48:14 +0000379- Bug #1432260: The names of lambda functions are now properly displayed
380 in pydoc.
Georg Brandl501dd0d2006-02-17 09:45:40 +0000381
Martin v. Löwis00756902006-02-05 17:09:41 +0000382- Patch #1412872: zipfile now sets the creator system to 3 (Unix)
383 unless the system is Win32.
384
Martin v. Löwisc81e3a62006-01-30 15:04:31 +0000385- Patch #1349118: urllib now supports user:pass@ style proxy
Martin v. Löwis3e865952006-01-24 15:51:21 +0000386 specifications, raises IOErrors when proxies for unsupported protocols
387 are defined, and uses the https proxy on https redirections.
388
Georg Brandl531ceba2006-01-21 07:20:56 +0000389- Bug #902075: urllib2 now supports 'host:port' style proxy specifications.
390
391- Bug #1407902: Add support for sftp:// URIs to urlparse.
Georg Brandl89f35ac2006-01-20 17:24:23 +0000392
Georg Brandlb709c2c2006-01-20 09:07:35 +0000393- Bug #1371247: Update Windows locale identifiers in locale.py.
394
Neal Norwitzf60cd472006-01-14 07:05:13 +0000395- Bug #1394565: SimpleHTTPServer now doesn't choke on query parameters
Georg Brandl45ab2332006-01-13 17:05:56 +0000396 any more.
Georg Brandlb709c2c2006-01-20 09:07:35 +0000397
Georg Brandl4edd9892006-01-13 16:59:46 +0000398- Bug #1403410: The warnings module now doesn't get confused
399 when it can't find out the module name it generates a warning for.
Georg Brandlb709c2c2006-01-20 09:07:35 +0000400
Martin v. Löwis412ed3b2006-01-08 10:45:39 +0000401- Patch #1177307: Added a new codec utf_8_sig for UTF-8 with a BOM signature.
402
Neal Norwitzab86f8e2005-12-23 21:44:36 +0000403- Patch #1157027: cookielib mishandles RFC 2109 cookies in Netscape mode
404
Neal Norwitz338e7862005-12-23 21:27:46 +0000405- Patch #1117398: cookielib.LWPCookieJar and .MozillaCookieJar now raise
406 LoadError as documented, instead of IOError. For compatibility,
407 LoadError subclasses IOError.
408
Brett Cannon3cbd0382005-12-16 22:49:23 +0000409- Added the hashlib module. It provides secure hash functions for MD5 and
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000410 SHA1, 224, 256, 384, and 512. Note that recent developments make the
411 historic MD5 and SHA1 unsuitable for cryptographic-strength applications.
412 In <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-December/058850.html>
413 Ronald L. Rivest offered this advice for Python:
414
415 "The consensus of researchers in this area (at least as
416 expressed at the NIST Hash Function Workshop 10/31/05),
417 is that SHA-256 is a good choice for the time being, but
418 that research should continue, and other alternatives may
419 arise from this research. The larger SHA's also seem OK."
Brett Cannon3cbd0382005-12-16 22:49:23 +0000420
Fredrik Lundh7e0aef02005-12-12 18:54:55 +0000421- Added a subset of Fredrik Lundh's ElementTree package. Available
422 modules are xml.etree.ElementTree, xml.etree.ElementPath, and
423 xml.etree.ElementInclude, from ElementTree 1.2.6.
424
Martin v. Löwis307021f2005-11-27 16:59:04 +0000425- Patch #1162825: Support non-ASCII characters in IDLE window titles.
426
Georg Brandl1f663572005-11-26 16:50:44 +0000427- Bug #1365984: urllib now opens "data:" URLs again.
428
Brett Cannonad07ff22005-11-23 02:15:50 +0000429- Patch #1314396: prevent deadlock for threading.Thread.join() when an exception
430 is raised within the method itself on a previous call (e.g., passing in an
431 illegal argument)
432
Brett Cannon5d0bf942005-11-02 23:04:26 +0000433- Bug #1340337: change time.strptime() to always return ValueError when there
434 is an error in the format string.
435
Georg Brandle8f24432005-10-03 14:16:44 +0000436- Patch #754022: Greatly enhanced webbrowser.py (by Oleg Broytmann).
437
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000438- Bug #729103: pydoc.py: Fix docother() method to accept additional
Georg Brandl8b813db2005-10-01 16:32:31 +0000439 "parent" argument.
440
Georg Brandlaa935172005-09-29 20:49:16 +0000441- Patch #1300515: xdrlib.py: Fix pack_fstring() to really use null bytes
442 for padding.
443
Georg Brandl80ba8e82005-09-29 20:16:07 +0000444- Bug #1296004: httplib.py: Limit maximal amount of data read from the
445 socket to avoid a MemoryError on Windows.
446
Matthias Klosef3f231f2005-09-20 07:02:49 +0000447- Patch #1166948: locale.py: Prefer LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE and LANG over LANGUAGE
448 to get the correct encoding.
449
450- Patch #1166938: locale.py: Parse LANGUAGE as a colon separated list of
451 languages.
452
Martin v. Löwis4ed67382005-09-18 08:34:39 +0000453- Patch #1268314: Cache lines in StreamReader.readlines for performance.
454
Brett Cannona783d062005-09-15 02:34:56 +0000455- Bug #1290505: Fix clearing the regex cache for time.strptime().
456
Martin v. Löwis5dbdc592005-08-27 10:07:56 +0000457- Bug #1167128: Fix size of a symlink in a tarfile to be 0.
458
Georg Brandl5a650a22005-08-26 08:51:34 +0000459- Patch #810023: Fix off-by-one bug in urllib.urlretrieve reporthook
460 functionality.
461
Martin v. Löwis8b595142005-08-25 11:03:38 +0000462- Bug #1163178: Make IDNA return an empty string when the input is empty.
463
Georg Brandl532efab2005-08-24 22:34:21 +0000464- Patch #848017: Make Cookie more RFC-compliant. Use CRLF as default output
465 separator and do not output trailing semicola.
466
Georg Brandlb9256022005-08-24 18:46:39 +0000467- Patch #1062060: urllib.urlretrieve() now raises a new exception, named
468 ContentTooShortException, when the actually downloaded size does not
469 match the Content-Length header.
470
Martin v. Löwis0a5d4a22005-08-24 14:55:22 +0000471- Bug #1121494: distutils.dir_utils.mkpath now accepts Unicode strings.
472
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000473- Bug #1178484: Return complete lines from codec stream readers
474 even if there is an exception in later lines, resulting in
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000475 correct line numbers for decoding errors in source code.
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000476
Georg Brandl6d2b3462005-08-24 07:36:17 +0000477- Bug #1192315: Disallow negative arguments to clear() in pdb.
478
Martin v. Löwisb813c532005-08-07 20:51:04 +0000479- Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
480
Georg Brandl649f8e72005-08-03 07:30:12 +0000481- Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
482 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
483
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000484- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
485 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
486 Tkdnd.
487
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000488- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
489 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
490
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000491- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
492 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
493
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000494- textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000495 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
496
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000497- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
498 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
499
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000500- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
501 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
502
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000503- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000504 it can be missing in embedded interpreters
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000505
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000506- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
507
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000508- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
509 error messages.
510
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000511- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
512
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000513- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
514 Bug #1224621.
515
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000516- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
517 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
518 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
519 terminates by raising StopIteration.
520
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000521- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
522
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000523- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
524 component of the path.
525
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000526- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
527 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
528 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
529 class at all.
530
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000531- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
532 files to PyPI.
533
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000534- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
535 them to PyPI.
536
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000537- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
538 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
539 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
540 work as expected.
541
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000542- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
543 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
544
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000545- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000546 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
547
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000548- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
549
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000550- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
551 to build.
552
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000553- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
554 symbolic links on Windows.
555
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000556- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000557 profile.py if available.
558
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000559- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
560
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000561- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
562 in LWPCookieJar.
563
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000564- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
565
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000566- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
567
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000568- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
569
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000570- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
571
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000572- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
573
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000574- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
575
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000576- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
577
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000578- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
579
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000580- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
581 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
582 be exploited in various ways.
583
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000584- Bug #1222790: in SimpleXMLRPCServer, set the reuse-address and close-on-exec
Andrew M. Kuchling3a976052005-12-04 15:07:41 +0000585 flags on the HTTP listening socket.
586
Andrew M. Kuchlinge63fde72005-12-04 15:36:57 +0000587- Bug #792570: SimpleXMLRPCServer had problems if the request grew too large.
588 Fixed by reading the HTTP body in chunks instead of one big socket.read().
589
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000590- Patches #893642, #1039083: add allow_none, encoding arguments to constructors of
Andrew M. Kuchling10a16de2005-12-04 16:34:40 +0000591 SimpleXMLRPCServer and CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler.
592
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000593- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
594
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000595- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
596
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000597- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
598
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000599- Enhancements to the csv module:
600
601 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000602 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000603 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000604 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
605 reporting.
606 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
607 dictates.
608 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000609 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000610 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000611 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
612 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000613 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
614 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000615 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000616 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
617 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
618 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
619 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
620 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
621 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
622 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
623 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
624 without first creating a dialect class.
625 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
626 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
627 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000628 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000629 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
630 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000631 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
632 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
633 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
634 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000635 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
636 This has been fixed.
637
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000638- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
639 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
640 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
641 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
642
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000643- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
644
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000645- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
646 (Bug #951915).
647
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000648- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
649 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
650 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000651 encoding alias table.
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000652
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000653- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
654
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000655- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
656 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
657
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000658- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
659
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000660- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
661
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000662- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
663
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000664- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
665
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000666- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
667
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000668- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
669 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
670 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
671
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000672- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000673 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000674
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000675- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
676 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
677 tokenizer with very long source lines.
678
Barry Warsaw538561e2006-01-01 21:48:54 +0000679- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called
680 immediately after creating the object, without any intervening
681 ``.decompress()`` calls.
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000682
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000683- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
684 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000685
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000686- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
687 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
688
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000689- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
690 correctly.
691
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000692- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
693 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
694 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
695 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
696 between two lines.
697
Walter Dörwalda47d1c02005-08-30 10:23:14 +0000698- Bug #1251300: On UCS-4 builds the "unicode-internal" codec will now complain
699 about illegal code points. The codec now supports PEP 293 style error
700 handlers.
701
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000702- Bug #1235646: ``codecs.StreamRecoder.next()`` now reencodes the data it reads
Walter Dörwaldc5238b82005-09-01 11:56:53 +0000703 from the input stream, so that the output is a byte string in the correct
704 encoding instead of a unicode string.
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000705
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000706- Bug #1202493: Fixing SRE parser to handle '{}' as perl does, rather than
707 considering it exactly like a '*'.
708
Walter Dörwald007f8df2005-10-09 19:42:27 +0000709- Bug #1245379: Add "unicode-1-1-utf-7" as an alias for "utf-7" to
710 ``encodings.aliases``.
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000711
Walter Dörwald09f0dd52005-11-21 19:10:07 +0000712- ` uu.encode()`` and ``uu.decode()`` now support unicode filenames.
713
Gustavo Niemeyer548148812006-01-31 18:34:13 +0000714- Patch #1413711: Certain patterns of differences were making difflib
715 touch the recursion limit.
716
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000717Build
718-----
719
Martin v. Löwis86d66262006-02-17 08:40:11 +0000720- Patch #1432345: Make python compile on DragonFly.
721
Martin v. Löwis856bf9a2006-02-14 20:42:55 +0000722- Build support for Win64-AMD64 was added.
723
Martin v. Löwisa55e55e2006-02-11 15:55:14 +0000724- Patch #1428494: Prefer linking against ncursesw over ncurses library.
725
Martin v. Löwisfd9a72a2006-01-08 10:07:33 +0000726- Patch #881820: look for openpty and forkpty also in libbsd.
727
Martin v. Löwis64c33dd2006-01-03 07:42:14 +0000728- The sources of zlib are now part of the Python distribution (zlib 1.2.3).
729 The zlib module is now builtin on Windows.
730
Martin v. Löwisd5845ec2005-12-30 12:31:38 +0000731- Use -xcode=pic32 for CCSHARED on Solaris with SunPro.
732
Martin v. Löwis147fbe52005-08-07 21:09:30 +0000733- Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
734 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
735
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000736- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
737 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
738
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000739- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
740 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
741 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000742 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000743
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000744- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
745 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
746 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
747
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000748- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
749
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000750- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
751 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
752
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000753- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
754 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
755 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
756 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
757 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
758 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
759 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
760 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
761
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000762- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
763 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
764 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
765 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
766
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000767C API
768-----
769
Raymond Hettingerbeb31012005-08-16 03:47:52 +0000770- Added a C API for set and frozenset objects.
771
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000772- Removed PyRange_New().
773
Walter Dörwaldd1c1e102005-10-06 20:29:57 +0000774- Patch #1313939: PyUnicode_DecodeCharmap() accepts a unicode string as the
775 mapping argument now. This string is used as a mapping table. Byte values
776 greater than the length of the string and 0xFFFE are treated as undefined
777 mappings.
778
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000779
780Tests
781-----
782
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000783- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000784
Hye-Shik Changaaa2f1d2005-12-10 17:44:27 +0000785- Patch #1276356: New resource "urlfetch" is implemented. This enables
786 even impatient people to run tests that require remote files.
787
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000788
789Documentation
790-------------
791
Georg Brandl8cb30772006-01-20 09:34:29 +0000792- Bug #1402224: Add warning to dl docs about crashes.
793
Georg Brandla3a93ae2006-01-20 09:14:36 +0000794- Bug #1396471: Document that Windows' ftell() can return invalid
795 values for text files with UNIX-style line endings.
796
Georg Brandl32252422005-09-14 20:42:00 +0000797- Bug #1274828: Document os.path.splitunc().
798
Georg Brandl79c122f2005-08-24 07:31:33 +0000799- Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py.
800
Georg Brandl6f2bbd32005-08-24 07:26:55 +0000801- Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation.
802
Georg Brandlf13c4ba2005-08-02 10:28:08 +0000803- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
804
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000805- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
806
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000807- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
808
809- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
810
811- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
812
813- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
814
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000815- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
816 Closes bug #1166582.
817
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000818- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
819 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
820 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
821
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000822Mac
823---
824
825
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000826New platforms
827-------------
828
829- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
830
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000831
832Tools/Demos
833-----------
834
Georg Brandl56897312005-08-24 18:32:30 +0000835- Added two new files to Tools/scripts: pysource.py, which recursively
836 finds Python source files, and findnocoding.py, which finds Python
837 source files that need an encoding declaration.
838 Patch #784089, credits to Oleg Broytmann.
839
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000840- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
841
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000842- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000843
Barry Warsaw538561e2006-01-01 21:48:54 +0000844- Fixed a display glitch in Pynche, which could cause the right arrow to
845 wiggle over by a pixel.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000846
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000847What's New in Python 2.4 final?
848===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000849
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000850*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000851
852Core and builtins
853-----------------
854
855- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
856 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
857 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
858
859
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000860What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
861==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000862
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000863*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000864
865Core and builtins
866-----------------
867
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000868- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
869 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
870 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
871
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000872
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000873Library
874-------
875
876- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
877 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
878 raised is re-raised.
879
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000880- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
881 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
882
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000883- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
884 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
885 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
886 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
887 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
888 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
889 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
890 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
891 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
892 by the slice are recomputed now.
893
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000894- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000895
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000896Build
897-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000898
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000899- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
900 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
901 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000902
903C API
904-----
905
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000906- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
907
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000908
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000909What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
910================================
911
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000912*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000913
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000914License
915-------
916
917The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
918is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
919changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
920Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
921intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
922durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
923the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
924License::
925
926 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
927
928says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
929to Python 2.1.1.
930
931The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
932License Version 2.
933
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000934Core and builtins
935-----------------
936
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000937- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
938 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
939 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
940 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
941 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
942 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
943 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
Andrew M. Kuchlingb2a739d2005-11-22 15:14:44 +0000944 ``AttributeError`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000945 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
946 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
947
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000948- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000949
950Extension Modules
951-----------------
952
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000953- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
954 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
955 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
956 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000957
958Library
959-------
960
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000961- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
962 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
963 returned.
964
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000965- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
966
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000967- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
968 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
969
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000970- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
971
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000972- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
973 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000974
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000975- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
976
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000977- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
978
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000979- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000980 the source code is updated and reloaded.
981
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000982Build
983-----
984
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000985- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000986
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000987What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
988================================
989
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000990*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000991
992Core and builtins
993-----------------
994
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000995- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000996 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
997
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000998- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
999 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
1000 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
1001 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
1002
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +00001003- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
1004 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
1005
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +00001006- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
1007 constant.
1008
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +00001009- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
1010 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
1011 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
1012 large), and to anomalies such as
1013 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
1014 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
1015 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
1016 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001017
1018Extension modules
1019-----------------
1020
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +00001021- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
1022 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +00001023 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
1024 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
1025 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001026
1027Library
1028-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +00001029
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +00001030- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +00001031 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +00001032 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
1033 --swig-cpp.
1034
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +00001035- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
1036 it is set.
1037
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +00001038- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +00001039
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +00001040- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
1041 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
1042 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
1043 Closes bug #1039270.
1044
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +00001045- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +00001046
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +00001047 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +00001048 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
1049 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
1050 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
1051 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
1052 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
1053 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
1054 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
1055 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
1056 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
1057 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
1058 + Updates to documentation.
1059
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +00001060- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
1061 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
1062 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
1063 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
1064
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +00001065- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001066
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +00001067- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
1068 applications should use the getmember function.
1069
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +00001070- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
1071
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +00001072- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
1073 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
1074 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
1075 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
1076 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
1077 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
1078 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
1079 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
1080 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
1081
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001082- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
1083 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +00001084 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001085
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +00001086- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
1087 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
1088 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
1089 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
1090 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
1091 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
1092 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
1093 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001094
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +00001095- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
1096 the new public features (of which there are many).
1097
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +00001098- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001099 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
1100 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
1101 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
1102 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +00001103 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001104
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +00001105- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
1106
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +00001107- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
1108 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
1109 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
1110 options.
1111
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +00001112- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
1113 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
1114 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
1115 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
1116 conditions under which non-string values work.
1117
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001118Build
1119-----
1120
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +00001121- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
1122 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
1123 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
1124
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +00001125- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
1126 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
1127 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
1128 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
1129 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001130
1131C API
1132-----
1133
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +00001134- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
1135 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
1136
1137- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
1138
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +00001139- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
1140 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
1141 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
1142 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
1143 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
1144 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
1145 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
1146 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
1147 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
1148
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +00001149- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
1150
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +00001151- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
1152 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
1153 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001154
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001155Tests
1156-----
1157
1158- test__locale ported to unittest
1159
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001160Mac
1161---
1162
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +00001163- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
1164 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
1165 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001166
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001167Tools/Demos
1168-----------
1169
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +00001170- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
1171 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
1172 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
1173 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
1174 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001175
1176
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001177What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
1178=================================
1179
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +00001180*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001181
1182Core and builtins
1183-----------------
1184
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001185- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001186 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
1187
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001188- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
1189 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
1190 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
1191 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
1192 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
1193 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
1194 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
1195 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001196 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
1197 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
1198 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
1199 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
1200 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001201
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +00001202- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
1203 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
1204 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
1205 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
1206 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
1207
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +00001208- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
1209
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +00001210- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
1211 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
1212
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +00001213- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
1214 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
1215 modified the list.
1216
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +00001217- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
1218 functions is now writable.
1219
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +00001220- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
1221 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
1222 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
1223 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
1224
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001225- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
1226 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
1227 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
1228 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
1229 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +00001230
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +00001231- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
1232 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
1233
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001234Extension modules
1235-----------------
1236
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001237- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
1238
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +00001239- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
1240 data.
1241
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001242- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
1243 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
1244 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
1245 supposed to have been truncated away.
1246
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +00001247- Added socket.socketpair().
1248
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +00001249- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
1250 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
1251
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001252- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +00001253 versions of Python, have now been removed.
1254
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001255Library
1256-------
1257
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001258- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001259 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001260
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +00001261- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
1262 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
1263
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +00001264- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
1265 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
1266
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001267- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
1268
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +00001269- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
1270 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +00001271
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +00001272- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
1273 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
1274
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +00001275- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
1276
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +00001277- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
1278
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +00001279- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
1280
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +00001281- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
1282 Percivall.
1283
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +00001284- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
1285 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
1286
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001287- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
1288 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
1289 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001290 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001291
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001292- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
1293 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
1294 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
1295 and exponent.
1296
1297- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
1298
1299- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +00001300 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001301 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
1302
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001303- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
1304 to the readline module.
1305
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001306- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001307 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
1308 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001309
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +00001310- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
1311 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
1312 contains symlinks.
1313
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +00001314- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
1315 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
1316
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +00001317- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
1318 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
1319 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1320
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001321- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
1322 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
1323 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
1324 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
1325 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
1326 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
1327 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
1328 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
1329 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
1330 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
1331 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
1332 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
1333 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
1334
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +00001335- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
1336
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001337Tools/Demos
1338-----------
1339
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001340- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
1341 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
1342
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +00001343- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
1344
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001345Build
1346-----
1347
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001348- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
1349 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
1350 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
1351 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
1352 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
1353 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
1354 plans to do so.
1355
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +00001356- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
1357 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
1358
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +00001359- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
1360 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
1361
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001362- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
1363 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
1364
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +00001365- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
1366 GNU/k*BSD systems.
1367
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +00001368- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
1369 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
1370
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001371C API
1372-----
1373
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001374..
1375
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001376Documentation
1377-------------
1378
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001379- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1380 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1381
1382- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1383 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1384 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001385
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001386New platforms
1387-------------
1388
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001389- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1390
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001391Tests
1392-----
1393
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001394..
1395
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001396Windows
1397-------
1398
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001399- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1400 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1401 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1402 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1403 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1404 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1405 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1406 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1407 the problem.
1408
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001409Mac
1410---
1411
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001412..
1413
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001414
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001415What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1416=================================
1417
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001418*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001419
1420Core and builtins
1421-----------------
1422
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001423- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1424 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1425 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1426 sensitive code.
1427
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001428- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001429 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001430
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001431 @staticmethod
1432 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001433
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001434 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001435
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001436- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1437 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1438 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1439 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1440 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1441 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1442 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1443 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1444 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1445 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1446 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1447
1448 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1449 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1450 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1451 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1452 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1453 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1454 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1455
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001456- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1457 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1458
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001459- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001460 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001461
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001462- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001463 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001464 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1465
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001466- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001467 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1468 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1469
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001470- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1471 types that support garbage collection.
1472
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001473- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1474
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001475- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1476 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1477 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1478 Jython.
1479
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001480- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1481
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001482- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1483 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1484
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001485- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1486 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1487 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001488
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001489- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1490 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1491 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1492
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001493Extension modules
1494-----------------
1495
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001496- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1497
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001498Library
1499-------
1500
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001501- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1502 TIS-620
1503
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001504- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1505 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1506 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1507 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1508 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1509 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1510 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1511 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1512 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1513 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1514
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001515- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1516
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001517- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1518 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1519 same as when the argument is omitted).
1520 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1521
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001522- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1523
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001524- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1525 schemes are offered.
1526
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001527- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1528
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001529- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1530 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1531 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1532
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001533- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1534
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001535- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1536 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1537
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001538- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1539 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1540 when dummy_threading is being used.
1541
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001542- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1543 from a tarfile.
1544
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001545- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001546 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001547
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001548- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1549 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1550 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1551 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1552
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001553- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1554 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1555
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001556- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1557 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1558 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1559 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1560 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1561 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1562 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1563 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1564 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1565 by some other method in progress).
1566
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001567- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1568 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1569 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001570
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001571- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1572
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001573- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1574 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1575 AM Kuchling.
1576
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001577- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1578 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1579 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1580
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001581- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1582 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1583 instead of unsigned.
1584
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001585- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001586 no longer part of the public API.
1587
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001588- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1589 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1590 string methods of the same name).
1591
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001592- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001593 SF patch 945642.
1594
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001595- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1596
1597 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1598
1599 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1600 DocTestSuites.
1601
1602- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1603 that provide thread-local data.
1604
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001605- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1606 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1607
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001608- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1609
1610- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1611 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1612 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1613
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001614- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1615
1616 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1617 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1618 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001619
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001620 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1621 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1622 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1623 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1624
1625 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1626 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1627
1628 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1629 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1630 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1631 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1632
1633 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1634 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1635 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1636 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1637 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1638
1639 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1640 wrapping help output.
1641
1642 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1643 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1644 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001645
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001646C API
1647-----
1648
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001649- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1650 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1651 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1652 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1653 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1654 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1655 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1656 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1657 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1658 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1659 its visible semantics have not changed.
1660
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001661- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1662 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1663
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001664Documentation
1665-------------
1666
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001667- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001668
1669 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001670 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001671
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001672 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001673
1674 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1675
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001676- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001677
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001678Tests
1679-----
1680
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001681- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001682 platforms that use the Makefile.
1683
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001684- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1685 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1686 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1687
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001688
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001689What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1690=================================
1691
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001692*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001693
1694Core and builtins
1695-----------------
1696
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001697- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1698 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1699 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1700 objects now (one object instead of three).
1701
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001702- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1703 Windows DLLs.
1704
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001705- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1706 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001707
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001708- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1709 a new .pyc magic.
1710
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001711- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1712 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1713 be there.
1714
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001715- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1716 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1717 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1718
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001719- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1720 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1721 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1722
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001723- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1724
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001725- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1726 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1727 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001728
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001729- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1730 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1731
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001732- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1733
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001734- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001735 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001736
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001737- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1738
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001739- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1740
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001741- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1742 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1743
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001744- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1745 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1746 Fixes bug #858016 .
1747
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001748- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1749 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1750 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1751
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001752- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1753 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1754 improves their performance (about 35%).
1755
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001756- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1757 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1758 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1759
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001760- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1761 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1762 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1763 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1764
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001765- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1766 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001767 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001768 length is not known).
1769
1770- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1771 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001772 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1773 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001774 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1775
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001776- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1777 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1778
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001779- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1780 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1781 keyword arguments.
1782
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001783- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1784 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1785 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1786
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001787- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1788 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1789 cases.
1790
1791- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1792 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1793 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1794 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1795 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1796 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1797 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1798 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1799 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1800 a release build.
1801
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001802- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1803 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1804
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001805- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001806 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001807
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001808- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1809 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1810 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1811 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1812 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1813 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1814 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1815 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1816 destroyed.
1817
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001818- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1819 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1820 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1821 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1822 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1823 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1824 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1825 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1826
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001827- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1828 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1829 character other than a space.
1830
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001831- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1832 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1833 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1834 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1835 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1836 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1837 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1838 attributes with the same name.
1839
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001840- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1841 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1842 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1843 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1844 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1845 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1846 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1847 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1848 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1849 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1850 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1851 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1852 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1853 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001854
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001855- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1856 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1857 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1858 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1859 This has been repaired.
1860
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001861- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1862
1863- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1864
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001865- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1866 over a sequence.
1867
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001868- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001869 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001870
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001871- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1872
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001873- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1874 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1875 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1876 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1877 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1878 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1879 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1880 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1881
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001882- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1883 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1884 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1885
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001886- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1887 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1888 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1889 freelist.
1890
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001891- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1892 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1893
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001894- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1895 number.
1896
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001897- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1898 a TypeError exception.
1899
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001900- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1901 820195.
1902
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001903- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1904 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1905 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1906
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001907- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001908 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1909 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001910
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001911- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1912 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1913 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1914
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001915- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1916 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001917 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001918
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001919- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001920 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1921 the first call.
1922
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001923
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001924Extension modules
1925-----------------
1926
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001927- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1928 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1929
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001930- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1931 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1932 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1933 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1934 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1935 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1936 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001937
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001938- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1939
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001940- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1941
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001942- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1943 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1944
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001945- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1946 fewer false positives.
1947
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001948- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1949 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1950
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001951- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001952 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1953
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001954- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001955 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001956 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001957 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1958 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001959
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001960- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1961 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1962 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1963 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1964
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001965- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1966 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1967 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1968 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1969 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1970 #897625.
1971
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001972- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1973 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1974
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001975- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1976 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1977 and pops on either side of the deque.
1978
1979- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1980 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1981
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001982- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1983 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1984 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1985 other functions that expect a function argument.
1986
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001987- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1988
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001989- os.getsid was added.
1990
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001991- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1992 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1993 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1994
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001995- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1996
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001997- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1998
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001999- readline.clear_history was added.
2000
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00002001- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
2002
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00002003- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
2004
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00002005- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
2006
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00002007- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
2008
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00002009- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
2010
2011- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
2012
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00002013- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
2014
2015- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
2016
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00002017- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
2018 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
2019 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
2020
2021- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
2022 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
2023 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
2024 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
2025 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
2026 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
2027 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
2028
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00002029- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
2030 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
2031 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
2032 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00002033
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002034- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00002035 iterators from a single iterable.
2036
2037- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
2038 of raising a TypeError exception.
2039
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00002040- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
2041 as parameter.
2042
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002043Library
2044-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00002045
Armin Rigoa871ef22006-02-08 12:53:56 +00002046- Added a new module: cProfile, a C profiler with the same interface as the
2047 profile module. cProfile avoids some of the drawbacks of the hotshot
2048 profiler and provides a bit more information than the other two profilers.
2049 Based on "lsprof" (patch #1212837).
2050
Georg Brandlf0de6a12005-08-22 18:02:59 +00002051- Bug #1266283: The new function "lexists" is now in os.path.__all__.
2052
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00002053- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
2054 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
2055 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002056
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00002057- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
2058 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
2059 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00002060
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00002061- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00002062
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00002063- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
2064 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00002065
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00002066- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
2067 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
2068
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00002069- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
2070
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00002071- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00002072 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00002073
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002074- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00002075 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002076
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00002077- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
2078
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00002079- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
2080 on cygwin and mingw32.
2081
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00002082- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
2083
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00002084- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
2085 module.
2086
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00002087- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
2088 installation scheme for all platforms.
2089
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00002090- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00002091 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00002092
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00002093- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
2094 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
2095 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
2096
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00002097- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
2098 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
2099 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
2100
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00002101- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
2102
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00002103- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
2104
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00002105- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
2106 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
2107
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00002108- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
2109 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
2110 type pattern with the same value exists.
2111
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00002112- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
2113 when run from the command prompt).
2114
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00002115- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
2116 not taken into consideration when caching value.
2117
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00002118- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
2119 default sort).
2120
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00002121- Added global runctx function to profile module
2122
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00002123- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
2124
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00002125- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
2126
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00002127- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
2128
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002129- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00002130 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
2131 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
2132 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
2133 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
2134 accordingly.
2135
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00002136- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
2137 decoding standards.
2138
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00002139- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
2140 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
2141 called for all requests.
2142
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00002143- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
2144 they are passed to the compiler.
2145
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00002146- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
2147 indent, width and depth.
2148
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00002149- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
2150 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
2151
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00002152- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
2153 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
2154
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00002155- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
2156
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00002157- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
2158
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00002159- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
2160
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00002161- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
2162 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
2163
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00002164- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00002165 for better performance.
2166
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002167- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00002168
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00002169- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
2170 a string).
2171
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00002172- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
2173
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00002174- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
2175
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00002176- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
2177
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00002178- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
2179
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00002180- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
2181 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
2182 list of fieldnames.
2183
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00002184- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
2185 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
2186
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00002187- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
2188
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00002189- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
2190 empty lists.
2191
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00002192- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
2193 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
2194 and shelves.
2195
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00002196- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
2197 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
2198
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002199- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00002200 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
2201 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002202
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00002203- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
2204 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00002205 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00002206
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002207- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00002208 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
2209 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
2210
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002211- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
2212 and removed in Py2.4.
2213
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00002214- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
2215
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00002216- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
2217
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002218Tools/Demos
2219-----------
2220
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00002221- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
2222 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
2223
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00002224- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
2225
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00002226- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
2227 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
2228 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
2229 destination in situations where both files are given.
2230
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00002231- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
2232 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
2233 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
2234 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
2235
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00002236- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
2237
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00002238- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
2239 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
2240 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
2241 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
2242 now.
2243
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002244- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
2245 in effect
2246
2247- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
2248 C-c C-h
2249
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00002250- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
2251 -d option was given.
2252
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002253Build
2254-----
2255
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00002256- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
2257 build under OS X.
2258
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00002259- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
2260 --enable-profiling.
2261
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00002262- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
2263 is configured --with-tsc.
2264
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00002265- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
2266 on AMD64.
2267
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00002268- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
2269 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
2270
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00002271- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
2272 removed.
2273
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00002274- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
2275 supported (see PEP 11).
2276
2277- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
2278
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00002279- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
2280
2281- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
2282 (see PEP 11).
2283
2284- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
2285 sizeof(char) must be 1.
2286
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002287C API
2288-----
2289
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00002290- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
2291 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
2292 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
2293
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00002294- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
2295 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
2296 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
2297 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
2298
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00002299- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
2300 generator objects.
2301
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002302- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
2303 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00002304 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
2305 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002306
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00002307- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
2308 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
2309
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00002310- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
2311 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
2312 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
2313 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
2314 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
2315
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00002316- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
2317 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
2318 about 10% faster.
2319
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00002320- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
2321 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
2322
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00002323- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
2324 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
2325 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
2326 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
2327
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002328Windows
2329-------
2330
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00002331- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
2332 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
2333 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
2334 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
2335
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00002336- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
2337 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
2338 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
2339
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002340
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002341What's New in Python 2.3 final?
2342===============================
2343
2344*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
2345
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002346IDLE
2347----
2348
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00002349- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
2350 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
2351 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
2352 context-menu actions.
2353
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002354- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
2355 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
2356 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
2357 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
2358 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
2359 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
2360 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
2361 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
2362 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
2363
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002364
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002365What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
2366=============================================
2367
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00002368*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002369
2370Core and builtins
2371-----------------
2372
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002373- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002374 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002375 comment at the end are still unsupported.
2376
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002377Extension modules
2378-----------------
2379
2380- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
2381 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
2382 than once. This has been fixed.
2383
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002384- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2385 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2386 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2387 call.
2388
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002389- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2390
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002391Library
2392-------
2393
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002394- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2395 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2396
2397- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2398 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2399 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2400 restored.
2401
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002402IDLE
2403----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002404
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002405- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002406
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002407Build
2408-----
2409
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002410- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2411 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2412
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002413C API
2414-----
2415
2416Windows
2417-------
2418
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002419- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2420 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2421
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002422- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2423
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002424Mac
2425---
2426
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002427- Various fixes to pimp.
2428
2429- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2430
2431- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2432 more problems than it solves.
2433
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002434
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002435What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2436=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002437
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002438*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2439
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002440Core and builtins
2441-----------------
2442
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002443- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2444 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2445
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002446- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2447 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002448 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002449
2450- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2451 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2452 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002453 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002454
2455- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2456 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002457
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002458- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2459 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2460 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2461
2462- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002463 770247.
2464
2465- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002466
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002467Extension modules
2468-----------------
2469
2470- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2471 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2472
2473- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2474
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002475- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2476
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002477- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2478 contained within the _strptime module.
2479
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002480- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2481 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2482
2483- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002484 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2485
2486- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2487 the find_class attribute, if present.
2488
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002489- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002490
2491 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2492 (SF bug 763298).
2493
2494 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002495 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2496 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2497 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002498
2499 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2500
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002501Library
2502-------
2503
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002504- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2505
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002506- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2507 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2508 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2509 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2510 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2511 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2512 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2513 or Tester().
2514
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002515- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2516 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2517 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2518 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2519 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2520 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2521 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2522 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2523 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002524
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002525 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002526
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002527- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2528 weren't before was an oversight.
2529
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002530- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2531 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2532
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002533- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2534 when there are no lines.
2535
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002536- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2537 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2538
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002539- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2540 to child processes.
2541
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002542- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2543
2544- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2545
2546- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2547 xmlrpclib.
2548
2549- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2550 responses.
2551
2552- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2553 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2554
2555- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2556 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2557 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2558
2559- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2560 used as patterns.
2561
2562- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2563 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2564 than Tk 8.3.
2565
2566- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2567
2568- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002569
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002570Tools/Demos
2571-----------
2572
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002573- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2574
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002575- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2576
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002577- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002578
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002579Build
2580-----
2581
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002582- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2583
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002584- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2585
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002586- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2587 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002588
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002589- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2590 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2591 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002592
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002593C API
2594-----
2595
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002596- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2597 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2598
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002599Windows
2600-------
2601
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002602- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2603 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2604 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2605 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2606 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2607 Python exception ::
2608
2609 thread.error: can't start new thread
2610
2611 is raised now.
2612
2613- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2614 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2615 instead of from DLL teardown.
2616
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002617Mac
2618---
2619
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002620- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002621 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002622 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2623 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2624 the executable in the bundle.
2625
2626- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002627
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002628- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2629
2630- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2631 on Panther.
2632
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002633What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2634================================
2635
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002636*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002637
2638Core and builtins
2639-----------------
2640
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002641- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2642 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2643 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2644 with the -i option.
2645
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002646- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2647 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2648
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002649- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2650 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2651
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002652- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2653 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2654 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2655 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2656 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2657 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2658 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2659 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2660 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2661 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2662 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2663 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2664 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002665
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002666- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2667 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2668 embedded in a lambda expression.
2669
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002670- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2671 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2672 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2673 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2674 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2675
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002676- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2677 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2678 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2679
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002680- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2681 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2682
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002683- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2684 It's writable again.
2685
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002686- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2687 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2688 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002689 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002690
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002691- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2692 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2693 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2694
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002695Extension modules
2696-----------------
2697
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002698- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2699 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2700
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002701- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2702 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2703 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2704 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2705
2706- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2707 collection.
2708
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002709- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2710 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2711 unique within a single program run.
2712
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002713- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2714 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2715
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002716- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2717 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2718
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002719- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2720 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002721
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002722- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2723
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002724- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2725 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2726
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002727- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2728 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2729 for many BSD-derived systems.
2730
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002731
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002732Library
2733-------
2734
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002735- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2736 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2737 primary ones:
2738
2739 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2740 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2741 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2742
2743 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2744 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2745 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2746 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2747 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2748 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2749
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002750- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2751 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2752 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2753 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2754 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2755 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2756 argument.
2757
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002758- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2759 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2760 in the archive.
2761
2762- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2763 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2764
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002765- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2766 569574).
2767
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002768- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2769 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2770 no more.
2771
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002772- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2773 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2774 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2775 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2776 code coverage.
2777
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002778- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2779 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2780 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002781 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2782 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002783
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002784- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2785 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2786 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002787 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002788
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002789- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2790
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002791- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2792 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2793 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2794 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2795
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002796- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2797 handling.
2798
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002799- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2800 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2801
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002802- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2803 in socket.py.
2804
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002805- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2806
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002807- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2808 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2809 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2810 opener with proxy support.
2811
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002812- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2813
2814- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2815
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002816Tools/Demos
2817-----------
2818
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002819- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2820
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002821- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2822
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002823- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2824 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002825
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002826- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2827 files.
2828
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002829Build
2830-----
2831
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002832- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002833 different root directory.
2834
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002835C API
2836-----
2837
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002838- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2839 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2840 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2841 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2842 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2843 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2844 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2845 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2846 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2847 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2848
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002849- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2850 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2851 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2852 from Python.
2853
2854
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002855New platforms
2856-------------
2857
2858None this time.
2859
2860Tests
2861-----
2862
2863- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2864 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2865
2866Windows
2867-------
2868
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002869- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2870
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002871- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2872 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2873 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2874 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2875 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2876 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2877 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2878 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2879 that's what it's for.
2880
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002881Mac
2882---
2883
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002884- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2885 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2886 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2887 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002888- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2889 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2890- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002891
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002892SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2893------------------------------------
2894
2895430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2896598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2897622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2898661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2899683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2900697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2901713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2902724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2903727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2904729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2905730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2906731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2907732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2908733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2909735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2910740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2911744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2912745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2913747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2914749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2915751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2916753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2917755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2918757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2919760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2920
2921
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002922What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2923================================
2924
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002925*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002926
2927Core and builtins
2928-----------------
2929
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002930- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2931 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2932
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002933- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2934 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2935 and cannot be strings).
2936
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002937- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2938 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2939 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2940 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2941
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002942- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2943 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2944 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2945 Python itself.
2946
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002947- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2948 the referenced object, if it has one.
2949
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002950- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2951 the thread started at
2952 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2953
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002954- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2955 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2956 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2957 placed on a list index.
2958
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002959- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2960 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2961 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2962 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2963
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002964- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2965 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2966 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2967 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2968 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2969 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2970 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2971
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002972- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2973 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2974 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2975 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2976 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2977
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002978- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2979 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002980
2981- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2982 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2983 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2984 #693195.)
2985
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002986- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2987 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002988
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002989- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002990 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002991 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2992 interpreter executions, would fail.
2993
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002994- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002995 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002996 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002997
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002998Extension modules
2999-----------------
3000
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00003001- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
3002 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
3003 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
3004 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
3005
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00003006- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
3007 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
3008
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00003009- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
3010 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
3011 and Greg Chapman.)
3012
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00003013- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
3014 recursively.
3015
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00003016- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00003017 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
3018 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
3019 leaks.
3020
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00003021- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
3022
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00003023- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
3024 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
3025 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
3026 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
3027 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
3028 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
3029 #705836.
3030
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00003031- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00003032 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
3033
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00003034- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
3035 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
3036 See SF bug #692416.
3037
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00003038- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
3039 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
3040
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00003041- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
3042 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
3043 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003044
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00003045- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00003046 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
3047 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
3048
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00003049- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
3050 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
3051 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
3052 timeouts to work properly.
3053
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003054Library
3055-------
3056
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00003057- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
3058 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
3059 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
3060 future release.
3061
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00003062- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
3063 for querying platform dependent features.
3064
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00003065- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00003066
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00003067- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
3068 pickle protocol versions.
3069
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00003070- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
3071 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
3072 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
3073
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00003074- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
3075
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00003076- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
3077 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
3078 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
3079 modules.
3080
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00003081- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
3082 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
3083 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
3084
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00003085- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
3086 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
3087
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00003088- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
3089 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
3090 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
3091
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003092- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00003093 MS Office extensions.
3094
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00003095- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
3096 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
3097
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00003098- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
3099 execution speed of expressions and statements.
3100
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003101- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
3102 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
3103 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
3104 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
3105 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
3106 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
3107
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00003108- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
3109 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
3110 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003111
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00003112- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
3113 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
3114 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
3115
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00003116- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
3117
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00003118- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
3119 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
3120 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
3121
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003122Tools/Demos
3123-----------
3124
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00003125- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
3126 See the module docstring for details.
3127
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003128Build
3129-----
3130
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00003131- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
3132 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003133
3134C API
3135-----
3136
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003137- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
3138
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00003139- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
3140 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
3141 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
3142
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003143- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
3144 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00003145
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003146 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
3147 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
3148 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00003149
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00003150- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00003151 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
3152
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00003153- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
3154 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
3155 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003156
3157New platforms
3158-------------
3159
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00003160None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003161
3162Tests
3163-----
3164
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00003165- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
3166 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003167
3168Windows
3169-------
3170
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00003171- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
3172 function.
3173
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00003174- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
3175 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003176
3177Mac
3178---
3179
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00003180- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
3181 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00003182
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00003183- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
3184 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003185
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00003186- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
3187 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
3188 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003189
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003190- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00003191 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
3192 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003193
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003194- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
3195 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003196
3197
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003198What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
3199=================================
3200
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003201*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003202
3203Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003204-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003205
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00003206- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
3207 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
3208 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
3209
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00003210- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
3211 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
3212 (SF patch #664376.)
3213
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003214- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
3215 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
3216 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
3217 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
3218 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
3219 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00003220 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003221
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003222- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
3223 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
3224 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
3225 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003226 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003227
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00003228- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
3229 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
3230 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
3231 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
3232 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
3233 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
3234 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
3235 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
3236 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
3237 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
3238 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
3239
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00003240- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
3241 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
3242 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
3243 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
3244 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
3245 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
3246
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00003247- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
3248 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
3249
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00003250- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
3251 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
3252 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
3253 case.)
3254
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00003255- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
3256 passed as unicode strings.
3257
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00003258- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
3259 See SF bug #683467.
3260
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00003261- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
3262 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
3263
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00003264- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
3265
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00003266- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
3267
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00003268- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
3269 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
3270 arguments.
3271
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00003272- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
3273 See SF bug #667147.
3274
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003275- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003276 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003277 See SF bug #676155.
3278
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003279- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003280 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003281 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
3282 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
3283 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
3284 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
3285 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
3286 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003287
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003288Extension modules
3289-----------------
3290
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003291- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
3292 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3293 tp_as_number pointer.
3294
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003295- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
3296 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
3297 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
3298 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
3299 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
3300
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003301- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
3302
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00003303- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
3304
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003305- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00003306 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003307 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
3308 patch #678531.)
3309
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00003310- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
3311 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
3312
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00003313- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
3314 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
3315
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00003316- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
3317
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00003318- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
3319 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
3320 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
3321
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003322- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
3323
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003324- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
3325 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
3326
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003327- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003328
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003329- datetime changes:
3330
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00003331 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
3332
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003333 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
3334 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
3335 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
3336 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
3337 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
3338 now.
3339
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003340 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003341 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
3342 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003343
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003344 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003345 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003346 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
3347 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
3348 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
3349 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003350
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003351 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
3352 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
3353 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003354 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
3355
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003356 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
3357 by a later example coded by Guido.
3358
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003359 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003360 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
3361 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
3362 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003363 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
3364 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
3365
3366 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
3367 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
3368 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
3369 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
3370 tzinfo subclass instance.
3371
3372 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
3373 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
3374 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
3375 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
3376 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
3377 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
3378 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
3379 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003380
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003381 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
3382 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3383 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3384 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3385 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003386 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3387
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003388 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003389
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003390 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3391 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3392 as a naive datetime object.
3393
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003394 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3395 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3396 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3397
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003398 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3399 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3400 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3401 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3402 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3403 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3404 comparison.
3405
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003406 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3407 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3408 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3409 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003410 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003411
3412 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003413
3414 and ::
3415
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003416 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3417
3418 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3419 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3420 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3421 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3422
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003423 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3424 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3425 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3426 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3427 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3428
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003429 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3430 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003431 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3432 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003433
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003434Library
3435-------
3436
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003437- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3438 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3439
3440- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3441 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3442 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3443 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3444 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3445 See PEP 307 for details.
3446
3447- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3448 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3449
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003450- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3451 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003452 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003453 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3454 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003455 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003456
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003457- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3458 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3459
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003460- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3461 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3462 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3463
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003464- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3465
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003466- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3467 exception.
3468
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003469- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3470 class.
3471
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003472- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3473 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3474 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3475
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003476- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3477 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3478
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003479- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003480 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3481 See SF bug #659228.
3482
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003483- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3484 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3485 See SF patch #651082.
3486
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003487- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003488
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003489- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3490 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3491
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003492- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003493 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003494
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003495- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3496 DOS paths from other platforms.
3497
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003498Tools/Demos
3499-----------
3500
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003501- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3502 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3503 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3504 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3505 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3506 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3507 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3508 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3509 example:
3510
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003511 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3512 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003513
3514 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3515
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003516
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003517Build
3518-----
3519
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003520- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3521 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3522 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003523 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3524
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003525 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3526
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003527- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3528 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3529 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3530 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3531 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3532 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3533 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3534 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3535 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3536
3537- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3538 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3539 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3540 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3541
3542- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3543 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3544
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003545C API
3546-----
3547
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003548- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3549 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003550
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003551- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3552 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3553 tp_as_number pointer.
3554
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003555- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3556 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3557 (SF #681367)
3558
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003559- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3560 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3561 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3562 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003563
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003564Tests
3565-----
3566
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003567- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003568 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3569 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3570 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3571 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3572 pydoc.)
3573
3574- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3575
3576- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003577
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003578Windows
3579-------
3580
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003581- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3582 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3583 time).
3584
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003585- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3586 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3587
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003588- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3589 release without strong cryptography.
3590
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003591- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003592 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003593
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003594- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3595 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3596
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003597Mac
3598---
3599
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003600- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3601 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003602
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003603- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3604 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3605 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003606
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003607- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3608 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003609
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003610- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3611 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3612 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3613 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003614
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003615- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003616 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3617 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3618 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003619
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003620
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003621What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003622=================================
3623
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003624*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003625
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003626Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003627--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003628
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003629- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3630
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003631- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3632 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003633 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003634 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003635 a different meaning than before.
3636
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003637- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003638 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003639 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003640
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003641- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003642 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003643 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003644
3645- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3646 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3647 and deallocation.
3648
3649- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3650 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3651
3652- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3653 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3654 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3655 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3656 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3657
3658- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3659 now detected by the garbage collector.
3660
3661- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3662 [SF bug 519621]
3663
3664- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3665 identifier.
3666
3667- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3668 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3669 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3670 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3671 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3672 [SF bug 563060]
3673
3674- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3675 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3676 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3677 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3678 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3679
3680- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3681 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3682 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3683
3684- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3685
3686- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3687 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3688 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3689 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3690 state of the slots would be lost.)
3691
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003692Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003693-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003694
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003695- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003696 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3697 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3698 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3699 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003700 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3701 Jython 2.1.
3702
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003703- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003704 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003705 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3706 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3707 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3708 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3709 these, see PEP 302.
3710
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003711- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3712 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3713 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3714
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003715- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3716 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3717 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3718
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003719- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3720 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3721 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3722
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003723- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3724 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3725 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3726 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3727 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3728 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3729 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3730 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3731 releases or implementations.
3732
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003733- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003734 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3735 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003736
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003737- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3738 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3739
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003740- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3741 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3742 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3743
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003744- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3745 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3746
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003747- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3748 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003749 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3750 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003751
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003752- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3753 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3754 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3755 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3756 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3757
3758 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3759 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3760 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3761 pattern.
3762
3763 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3764 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3765 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3766 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3767
3768 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3769 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3770 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3771 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3772 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3773 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3774
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003775- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3776 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3777 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3778 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3779 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3780 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3781 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3782 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003783
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003784- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3785 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3786 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3787 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3788 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003789 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3790 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3791 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3792 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3793 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3794 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3795 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003796
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003797- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3798 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3799
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003800- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3801 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3802 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3803 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3804 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3805 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3806 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3807 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3808 to Zack Weinberg!
3809
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003810- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3811 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3812 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3813 type. This has been fixed now.
3814
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003815- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3816 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3817 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3818
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003819- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3820 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3821 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3822 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3823 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3824 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3825 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3826 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003827 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003828
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003829- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3830 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3831 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003832
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003833- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3834 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3835 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3836 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3837 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3838 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3839 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3840 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003841 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003842 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3843 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3844
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003845- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3846 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3847 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3848 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3849 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3850 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3851 this.)
3852
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003853- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3854 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003855 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003856 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003857 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3858 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003859 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3860 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003861
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003862- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3863 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3864 currently running.
3865
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003866- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3867 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3868 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3869 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3870
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003871- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3872 as directory names.
3873
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003874- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3875 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3876
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003877- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3878 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3879
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003880- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003881 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3882 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003883
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003884- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3885 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3886 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3887 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3888 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3889
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003890- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3891 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3892 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3893 removed.
3894
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003895- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3896 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3897 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3898
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003899- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3900 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3901 to __debug__.
3902
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003903- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3904 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3905 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3906
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003907- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3908 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3909 deprecated now.
3910
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003911- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3912 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3913 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003914
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003915- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3916 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3917 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3918 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3919 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003920
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003921- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3922 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3923
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003924- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3925 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3926 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003927 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003928 is backward compatible.
3929
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003930- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3931 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3932 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3933 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3934 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3935
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003936- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3937 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3938 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3939 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3940 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3941 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003942
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003943- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3944 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3945
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003946- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3947 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3948
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003949- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3950 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3951 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3952 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3953 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3954
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003955- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3956 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3957 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3958
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003959- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003960 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3961
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003962- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3963 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3964 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003965
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003966- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3967 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3968
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003969- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3970 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3971 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3972
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003973- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3974
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003975Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003976-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003977
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003978- Added three operators to the operator module:
3979 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3980 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3981 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3982
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003983- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3984
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003985- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3986 archives.
3987
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003988- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3989 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3990 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3991
3992 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3993
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003994- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3995 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3996 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003997 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003998
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003999- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
4000 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
4001 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
4002 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00004003 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
4004 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
4005 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
4006 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00004007
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00004008- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
4009 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00004010
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00004011- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
4012
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00004013- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
4014 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
4015
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00004016- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
4017 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
4018 supported.
4019
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00004020- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
4021
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00004022- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
4023 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00004024
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00004025- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
4026 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
4027
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00004028- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
4029
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00004030- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
4031 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
4032
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00004033- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
4034 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
4035 functions but callable type objects.
4036
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004037- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00004038 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004039 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00004040
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00004041- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
4042 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00004043
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00004044- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
4045 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00004046
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00004047- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
4048 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
4049 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
4050 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
4051
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00004052- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
4053 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00004054
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00004055- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
4056 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
4057 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
4058 and __imul__.
4059
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00004060- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00004061 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
4062 is called.
4063
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00004064- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
4065 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
4066 interpreter was compiled.
4067
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00004068- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
4069 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
4070 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004071 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00004072 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
4073 1, not 2.
4074
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00004075- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
4076 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
4077 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
4078 limit.
4079
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00004080- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
4081 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
4082 bug #623464.
4083
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00004084- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
4085 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
4086 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
4087 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
4088
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004089Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004090-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004091
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00004092- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
4093
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00004094- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
4095 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
4096 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
4097 with Python 2.3a2.
4098
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00004099- os.path exposes getctime.
4100
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004101- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004102 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004103 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004104 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004105 unit tests of floating point results.
4106
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00004107- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
4108 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
4109 has been increased.
4110
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00004111- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
4112 executed.
4113
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00004114- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
4115 postinstallation script.
4116
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00004117- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
4118 test the current module.
4119
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004120- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00004121 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
4122 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
4123 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
4124 this behavior needs to be controlled.
4125
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00004126- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00004127 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00004128 Ward's Optik package.
4129
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00004130- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
4131 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
4132 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
4133 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
4134
4135- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
4136 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00004137 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00004138
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00004139- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
4140 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
4141 shelf are binary pickles.
4142
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00004143- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
4144 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
4145
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00004146- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
4147 modules are iterators now.
4148
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00004149- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
4150 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
4151 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
4152 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
4153 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
4154 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004155
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00004156- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
4157 with their entity value.
4158
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00004159- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
4160
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004161- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
4162 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00004163
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004164- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
4165 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004166 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00004167
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00004168- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
4169 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
4170 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
4171 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
4172 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
4173 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
4174 main():
4175
4176 import locale
4177 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
4178
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00004179- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
4180 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
4181
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00004182- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
4183 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
4184 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
4185 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
4186 to the new standard.
4187
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00004188- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
4189 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
4190 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
4191 an extension to the database.
4192
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004193- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
4194 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
4195 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
4196 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00004197 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004198
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004199- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00004200 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004201
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00004202- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
4203 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
4204 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
4205 bounded integers.
4206
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00004207- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
4208 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
4209 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
4210 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
4211 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
4212 in existence.
4213
4214 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
4215 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
4216 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
4217 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
4218 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
4219 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
4220
4221 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
4222 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
4223 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
4224 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
4225
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00004226- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
4227 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
4228 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
4229
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00004230- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
4231
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004232- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
4233 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
4234 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
4235 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
4236
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00004237- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
4238 argument.
4239
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00004240- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
4241 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
4242 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
4243 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
4244 [SF patch 560794].
4245
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004246- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
4247 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
4248 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00004249 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
4250 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
4251 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004252
4253- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
4254 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00004255
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00004256- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
4257 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
4258 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
4259 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00004260
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00004261- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
4262 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
4263 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
4264 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
4265 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
4266
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004267- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00004268
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00004269- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
4270
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00004271- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
4272 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
4273 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
4274 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
4275 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
4276 identical to None.
4277
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00004278- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
4279 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
4280 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
4281 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
4282 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
4283 results now.
4284
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00004285- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
4286 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
4287
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004288- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
4289 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
4290 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
4291 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
4292 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
4293 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
4294 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
4295 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
4296
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00004297- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
4298
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00004299- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
4300 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
4301
4302- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
4303 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
4304 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
4305 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
4306 and other systems.
4307
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004308- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
4309 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
4310 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
4311 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 +00004312 work well with these.
4313
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00004314- compileall now supports quiet operation.
4315
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004316- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00004317 connections.
4318
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00004319- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
4320 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
4321 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
4322
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00004323- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
4324 sets
4325
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00004326- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
4327 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
4328 name.
4329
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00004330- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
4331 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
4332 passed in.
4333
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004334- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00004335 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00004336 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
4337 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00004338
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00004339- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
4340
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00004341- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
4342
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00004343- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
4344 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
4345 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
4346
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004347- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
4348 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
4349 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
4350 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00004351 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004352
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004353- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004354 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004355 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004356
4357- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
4358 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
4359 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
4360
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004361- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00004362 the value of its expression argument.
4363
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004364- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
4365 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
4366 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
4367
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00004368- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
4369 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
4370 skipstone browser was included.
4371
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00004372- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
4373 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
4374
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004375Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004376-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004377
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00004378- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
4379 names in addition to accepting file names.
4380
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00004381- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
4382 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4383 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4384 still used and useful.)
4385
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004386- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4387 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4388 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4389 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004390
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004391- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4392 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4393 the generated binary.
4394
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004395Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004396-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004397
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004398- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4399
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004400- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4401 except in the hands of experts.
4402
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004403- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004404 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4405 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4406 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004407
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004408- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4409 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4410 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4411 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4412 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4413 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4414 builds.
4415
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004416- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4417 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4418 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4419 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4420 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4421 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4422 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4423 new type.
4424
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004425- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004426
4427 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4428 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4429 positive infinities.
4430
4431 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4432 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4433 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4434 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4435 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4436 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4437 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4438
4439 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4440
4441 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4442
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004443- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4444 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4445 size of the executable.
4446
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004447- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4448 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4449 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4450 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004451
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004452- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4453
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004454- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4455 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4456 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004457
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004458- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4459 well as Unix.
4460
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004461- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4462 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4463 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4464 modules in the README file for details.
4465
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004466C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004467-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004468
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004469- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4470 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004471 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004472 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004473 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004474
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004475- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4476 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4477 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4478 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4479 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4480 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004481 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004482 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4483 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4484 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4485 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4486 aligned.)
4487
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004488- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4489 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4490 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4491
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004492- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4493 level.
4494
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004495- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4496 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4497 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4498 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4499 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4500
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004501- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4502 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4503 code.
4504
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004505- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4506 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4507 adjusting for negative indices.
4508
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004509- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4510 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4511 object.
4512
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004513- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4514 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4515 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4516
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004517- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4518 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004519
4520- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4521
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004522- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4523 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4524 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4525 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4526
4527- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4528
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004529- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004530
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004531- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004532 without going through the buffer API.
4533
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004534- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004535
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004536- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4537 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4538 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4539 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4540
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004541- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4542 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4543
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004544- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004545 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4546
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004547New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004548-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004549
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004550- OpenVMS is now supported.
4551
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004552- AtheOS is now supported.
4553
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004554- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4555
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004556- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4557
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004558Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004559-----
4560
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004561- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4562 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4563 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004564
4565Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004566-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004567
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004568- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4569 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4570 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4571 bugs.
4572 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004573 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004574 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4575 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004576 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004577
4578- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004579 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004580
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004581- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4582 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4583
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004584- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4585 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004586 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004587 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4588
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004589- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4590 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4591 use files" uninstall option).
4592
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004593- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4594
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004595- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4596 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4597
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004598- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4599 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4600 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4601
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004602- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4603 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4604 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4605 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4606 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004607 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4608 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4609 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004610
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004611- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004612 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004613 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4614 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4615 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4616 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4617 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4618 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4619 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4620 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4621 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4622 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4623 work around.
4624
4625- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4626 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4627 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4628 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4629 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4630 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4631 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4632 specified with O_CREAT too).
4633
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004634Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004635----
4636
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004637- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004638
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004639- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4640 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4641 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4642
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004643- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4644 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4645 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4646
4647- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4648 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4649 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4650 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4651 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4652 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4653 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4654 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004655
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004656- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4657 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4658 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004659
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004660- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4661 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4662 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4663 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4664 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004665
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004666- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4667 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4668 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004669
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004670- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4671 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004672
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004673- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4674 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4675 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4676 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4677 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004678
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004679- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4680 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4681 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4682
4683- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4684 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4685 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004686
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004687- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4688 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4689 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4690 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004691 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004692
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004693- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4694 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004695
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004696- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4697 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004698
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004699- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004700 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004701 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4702 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004703
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004704
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004705What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004706===============================
4707
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004708*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4709
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004710Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004711--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004712
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004713- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4714 with a custom metaclass.
4715
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004716Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004717-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004718
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004719- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4720 are proxies.
4721
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004722Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004723-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004724
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004725- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4726 very short strings.
4727
4728- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4729 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4730 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4731 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4732 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4733
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004734Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004735-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004736
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004737- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4738 close or delete time).
4739
4740- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4741 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4742
4743- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4744
4745- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004746 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004747
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004748Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004749-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004750
4751Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004752-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004753
4754C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004755-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004756
4757New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004758-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004759
4760Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004761-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004762
4763Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004764-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004765
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004766- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4767
4768- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4769 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4770
4771- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4772 deleted at process exit time.
4773
4774- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4775 in backslash.
4776
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004777Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004778----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004779
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004780- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4781 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4782 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4783
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004784
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004785What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004786===========================
4787
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004788*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4789
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004790Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004791--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004792
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004793- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4794 been extensively updated. See
4795
4796 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4797
4798 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4799
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004800- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4801 deleted!
4802
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004803- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4804 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4805 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4806 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4807 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4808
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004809- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4810
4811 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4812 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4813
4814 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4815 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4816 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4817 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4818 supported anyway.
4819
4820 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4821 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4822
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004823- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4824 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4825 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4826 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4827 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004828
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004829- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4830 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4831 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4832
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004833Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004834-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004835
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004836- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4837 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4838 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4839 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4840 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4841 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004842 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4843 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4844 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4845 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004846
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004847- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4848 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4849 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4850
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004851Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004852-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004853
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004854- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4855
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004856Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004857-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004858
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004859- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4860 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4861 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4862 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4863 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4864 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4865
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004866- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4867
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004868- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4869
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004870- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4871
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004872- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4873 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4874 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4875
4876- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4877
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004878Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004879-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004880
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004881- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4882 off a search on Google.
4883
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004884Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004885-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004886
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004887- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4888 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4889 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4890 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4891 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4892 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4893 other platforms should do likewise.
4894
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004895- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4896 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4897 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4898
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004899C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004900-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004901
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004902- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4903 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4904 producing key-value pairs.
4905
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004906- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004907 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004908 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4909 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4910 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4911 previously went unchallenged.
4912
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004913New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004914-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004915
4916Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004917-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004918
4919Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004920-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004921
4922Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004923----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004924
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004925- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4926 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004927
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004928- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4929 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4930 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4931 home.
4932
4933
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004934What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004935===========================
4936
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004937*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4938
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004939Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004940--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004941
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004942- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4943 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004944
4945 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004946 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004947
4948 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4949 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004950 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004951 This needs to be documented.
4952
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004953- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4954 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4955
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004956- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4957 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4958 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4959
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004960- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4961 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4962
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004963- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4964 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4965 class forbids it).
4966
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004967- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4968 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4969 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4970
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004971- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4972
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004973Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004974-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004975
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004976- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4977 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004978 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004979
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004980- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4981 (like 1 + '').
4982
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004983Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004984-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004985
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004986- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4987 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4988 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4989 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004990 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004991 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4992
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004993- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4994 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4995 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4996 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4997
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004998- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4999 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00005000 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
5001 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
5002 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00005003
5004- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
5005 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00005006
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00005007- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
5008 bytes on its input.
5009
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005010Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005011-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005012
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00005013- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00005014 convenience function.
5015
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00005016- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
5017 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
5018 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005019 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
5020 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
5021 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
5022 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
5023 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
5024 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00005025
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00005026- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
5027 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
5028 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
5029 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
5030
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00005031- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
5032 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
5033 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
5034
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00005035- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
5036 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
5037 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
5038 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
5039
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005040- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
5041 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005042 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005043 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
5044 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
5045 new -l and -e options.
5046
5047- statcache is now deprecated.
5048
5049- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
5050 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005051 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005052 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
5053 time properly taken into account.
5054
5055- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
5056 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
5057 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
5058 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
5059
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005060Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005061-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005062
5063Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005064-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005065
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005066- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
5067 is built with libdb3 if available.
5068
5069- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
5070
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005071C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005072-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005073
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00005074- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
5075 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
5076 PySequence_Size().
5077
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005078- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
5079
5080- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
5081 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
5082 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
5083
5084- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
5085 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
5086
5087- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
5088 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
5089
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005090New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005091-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005092
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00005093- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
5094 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
5095
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00005096- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
5097 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
5098
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00005099- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
5100
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005101Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005102-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005103
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00005104- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
5105 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
5106
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005107Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005108-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005109
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005110Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005111----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005112
5113- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
5114 removed completely in the next release.
5115
5116- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
5117 OSX.
5118
5119- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
5120 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
5121
5122- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
5123
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005124
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005125What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005126===========================
5127
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005128*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
5129
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005130Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005131--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005132
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005133- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005134 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005135 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005136 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
5137 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005138 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
5139 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005140 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
5141 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00005142
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00005143- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
5144 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
5145
5146- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
5147 class methods, static methods, and properties.
5148
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005149Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005150-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005151
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00005152- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
5153 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
5154 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
5155 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
5156 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
5157 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
5158 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
5159 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
5160
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005161- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
5162 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
5163 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
5164 example).
5165
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005166- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005167 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005168 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005169 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005170
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005171- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
5172 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
5173 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00005174 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005175
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005176- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
5177 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
5178 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
5179 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
5180 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
5181 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
5182
5183 isinstance(x, (A, B))
5184
5185 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
5186
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005187Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005188-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005189
5190- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
5191
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005192- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
5193
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005194- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
5195 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00005196
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005197- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
5198 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
5199 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
5200 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
5201 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
5202 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00005203 attributes.
5204
5205- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
5206 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
5207 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00005208
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005209- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
5210 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
5211 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005212
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005213- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
5214 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
5215 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005216 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
5217 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
5218
5219- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
5220 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005221
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005222Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005223-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005224
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00005225- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
5226 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
5227
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005228- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
5229 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
5230 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
5231 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
5232
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00005233- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
5234 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
5235 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
5236 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
5237
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00005238 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
5239 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
5240 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
5241 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
5242 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
5243 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
5244 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
5245 without losing information).
5246
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005247- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005248 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
5249 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
5250 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
5251 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
5252 module).
5253
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00005254 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005255 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
5256 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
5257 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
5258 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005259
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005260- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00005261 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
5262 encoding.
5263
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00005264- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
5265 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
5266
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005267- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005268 to allow saving the message body to a file.
5269
5270- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
5271 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
5272 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
5273 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
5274
5275- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
5276
5277- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
5278 ON, and OFF.
5279
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005280- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
5281 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
5282
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005283Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005284-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005285
5286- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
5287 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
5288 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005289
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005290- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
5291 been added: -X and -E.
5292
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005293Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005294-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005295
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005296- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
5297 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
5298
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005299C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005300-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005301
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00005302- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
5303 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
5304 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
5305 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
5306 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
5307
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00005308- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
5309 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
5310 as long) arguments.
5311
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005312- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
5313 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
5314 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
5315 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
5316 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
5317 report any bugs or strange behavior).
5318
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005319- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
5320 input.
5321
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005322New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005323-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005324
5325Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005326-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005327
5328Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005329-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005330
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00005331- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
5332 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
5333 is created for .py and .pyw files.
5334
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005335- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
5336 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
5337 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005338 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005339
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005340 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
5341 # (SIGINT) behavior.
5342 import signal
5343 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005344
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005345 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005346 while 1:
5347 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005348 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005349 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
5350 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
5351 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
5352 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005353
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005354
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005355What's New in Python 2.2a4?
5356===========================
5357
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005358*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
5359
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005360Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005361--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005362
5363- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
5364 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
5365 documentation for all operations on list objects.
5366
5367- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
5368 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
5369 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
5370 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
5371 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
5372 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
5373 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005374
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005375- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005376 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005377 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
5378 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
5379 associate a docstring with a property.
5380
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005381- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
5382 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5383 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5384 other built-in object types.
5385
5386- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5387 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5388 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5389 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5390 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5391
5392- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5393 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5394
5395- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5396 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005397 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005398 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5399 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5400 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5401 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5402 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5403
5404- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5405 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5406 class.
5407
5408- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5409 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5410 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5411 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5412
5413- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5414 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5415 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5416 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5417
5418- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5419 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5420
5421- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5422 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5423 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5424 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5425 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005426 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005427 with the same value as s.
5428
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005429- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5430
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005431Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005432----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005433
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005434- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5435
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005436- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5437 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5438 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5439 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5440 objects.
5441
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005442- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5443 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005444 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5445 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5446
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005447- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5448 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5449 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5450
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005451Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005452-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005453
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005454- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5455 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5456 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5457 by the instances.
5458
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005459- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5460 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5461 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5462
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005463- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5464 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5465 before the entire comparison is complete.
5466
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005467- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5468 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5469 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5470
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005471- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5472 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5473 getwriter().
5474
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005475- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5476 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5477
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005478- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005479 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5480 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5481
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005482- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5483 iterable object.
5484
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005485- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5486 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005487
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005488- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5489 authentication.
5490
5491- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5492 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005493
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005494- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005495 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5496 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5497 a sample driver.)
5498
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005499Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005500-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005501
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005502- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5503 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5504 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5505 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5506 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5507 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5508 kernel has large file support.
5509
5510- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5511 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5512 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5513 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5514 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5515
5516- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5517 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5518 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5519
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005520C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005521-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005522
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005523- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5524 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5525
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005526New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005527-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005528
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005529- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5530 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5531
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005532Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005533-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005534
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005535- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5536 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5537 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5538 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5539 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5540
5541- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5542 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5543 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5544 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5545
5546- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5547 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5548
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005549Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005550-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005551
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005552- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005553 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5554 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005555
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005556
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005557What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5558===========================
5559
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005560*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5561
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005562Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005563----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005564
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005565- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5566 big to represent as a C double.
5567
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005568- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5569 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5570 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5571 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5572 restriction).
5573
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005574- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5575 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5576 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5577 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5578 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5579
5580 >>> dir([])
5581 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5582 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5583 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5584 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5585 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5586 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5587 'reverse', 'sort']
5588
5589 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5590
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005591- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005592 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5593 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5594 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5595 OverflowError exception.
5596
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005597- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005598 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005599 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5600 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5601 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5602 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5603 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005604 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005605 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5606 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5607
5608 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5609 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5610 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5611 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005612
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005613- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005614 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5615 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5616 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5617 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5618 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5619 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5620 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5621 once it is created.
5622
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005623- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5624 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5625 (key, value) pairs.
5626
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005627- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005628 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5629 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5630
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005631- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5632 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5633 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5634 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5635 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005636
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005637- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005638 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5639 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5640
5641 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5642
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005643- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005644 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5645
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005646Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005647-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005648
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005649- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005650 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5651 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005652
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005653- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5654 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5655 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5656 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5657 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5658 in this area anymore).
5659
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005660- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5661 threading.Timer.
5662
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005663- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5664 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5665
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005666- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005667 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5668
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005669- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005670 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5671 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5672 converted to Python longs.
5673
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005674- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005675 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5676
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005677- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5678 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5679 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5680
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005681Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005682-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005683
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005684- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5685 division operators as per PEP 238.
5686
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005687Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005688-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005689
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005690- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5691 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5692 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5693 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5694
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005695C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005696-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005697
5698- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005699
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005700- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5701 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005702 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005703
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005704 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5705 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005706 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005707 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005708
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005709- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005710 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5711 module:
5712
5713 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005714
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005715 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5716 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005717
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005718 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5719 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005720
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005721 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5722
5723 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5724
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005725- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005726 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5727 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5728 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005729
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005730New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005731-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005732
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005733- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5734 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5735 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5736 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5737 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005738
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005739Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005740-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005741
5742Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005743-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005744
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005745- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5746 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5747 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5748 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005749 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5750 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5751 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5752 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5753 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005754
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005755- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005756 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5757
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005758
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005759What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5760===========================
5761
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005762*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5763
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005764Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005765-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005766
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005767- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5768 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5769
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005770- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5771 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5772 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005773
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005774- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5775 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5776 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5777 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005778
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005779- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5780
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005781- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005782
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005783Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005784-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005785
5786- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005787 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005788 the module docstring for details.
5789
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005790Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005791-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005792
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005793- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005794 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5795 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5796 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005797
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005798- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5799 Nick Mathewson.
5800
5801Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005802----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005803
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005804- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5805 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5806 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5807 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5808 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5809 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5810 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5811 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5812
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005813- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5814 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5815 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5816 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5817
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005818- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5819 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5820 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5821 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5822 come a long way).
5823
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005824- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5825 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5826 write filters for these warnings).
5827
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005828- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5829 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5830 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5831 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5832 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5833
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005834- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5835 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5836 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5837 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5838 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5839 older distribution.
5840
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005841Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005842-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005843
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005844- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5845 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005846 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005847
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005848- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5849 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5850 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5851
5852- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5853
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005854- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5855
5856- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5857
5858- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5859
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005860- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005861
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005862- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5863
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005864New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005865-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005866
5867C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005868-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005869
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005870- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5871 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5872 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5873 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5874 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5875 against buffer overruns.
5876
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005877- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005878 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5879 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005880 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5881 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5882 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5883
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005884- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5885 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5886 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5887 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5888 deprecated.
5889
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005890Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005891-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005892
5893- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5894 relevant is found.
5895
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005896
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005897What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005898===========================
5899
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005900*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5901
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005902Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005903----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005904
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005905- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5906 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5907 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5908 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5909 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5910 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5911 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5912 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005913 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005914 repaired.
5915
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005916- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005917 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005918 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5919 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5920 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5921 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5922 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5923 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5924 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5925 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5926
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005927- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5928 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5929 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5930 leading BMO character).
5931
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005932- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5933 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5934 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5935
5936 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5937 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5938 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005939
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005940 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5941 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5942 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5943 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5944 for various simple to use conversions.
5945
5946 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5947 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5948
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005949 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5950 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5951 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5952 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5953 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5954 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5955 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5956 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5957 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5958 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5959 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5960 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5961 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5962 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5963 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005964
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005965- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5966 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5967 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005968 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005969 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005970
5971 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005972 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5973 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5974 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5975 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5976 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005977 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5978 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005979
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005980 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5981 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5982 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005983 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005984
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005985- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5986 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5987 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5988 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5989 floating arithmetic,
5990
5991 x = 9007199254740992.0
5992 print long(x)
5993
5994 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5995 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5996 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5997 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5998 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5999 functions are of good quality).
6000
6001 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
6002 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
6003 algorithms to break.
6004
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00006005- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
6006 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
6007 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
6008 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
6009 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
6010 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
6011 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
6012 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
6013 order.
6014
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00006015- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
6016 operation along the most common code paths.
6017
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00006018- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
6019 the same as dict.has_key(x).
6020
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00006021- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
6022 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
6023 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
6024 {}.update(UserDict())
6025
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00006026- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
6027 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
6028 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
6029 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
6030 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
6031 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
6032 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
6033 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
6034
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00006035- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00006036 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006037
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00006038 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00006039 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
6040 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00006041 join() method of strings
6042 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00006043 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
6044 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006045 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00006046 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00006047
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00006048- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
6049 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
6050
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00006051- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
6052 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
6053
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00006054- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
6055 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
6056 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
6057 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
6058
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00006059- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
6060 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00006061 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00006062 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
6063 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00006064
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00006065- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
6066
6067
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006068Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006069-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006070
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00006071- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006072 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00006073 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
6074 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
6075
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00006076- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
6077 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
6078
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00006079- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
6080 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
6081 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
6082 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
6083
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00006084- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
6085 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
6086 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
6087
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00006088- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
6089
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00006090- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
6091
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00006092- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
6093 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
6094 that are still imported into string.py).
6095
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006096- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
6097
6098- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
6099 Now it does.
6100
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00006101- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
6102
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00006103- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
6104 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
6105 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
6106 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
6107 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00006108 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
6109 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00006110
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00006111- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
6112 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
6113 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
6114 'help(object)'.
6115
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006116Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006117-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006118
6119- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006120 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006121 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
6122 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
6123
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006124- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00006125 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
6126 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006127
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00006128C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006129-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00006130
6131- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
6132 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006133
6134----
6135
6136**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**