blob: 8b4068ec41b8fa4507d63a62a918eaa192fddef3 [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
Barry Warsawe2eca0b2005-08-15 18:14:19 +000015- SF bug #900092: When tracing (e.g. for hotshot), restore 'return' events for
16 exceptions that cause a function to exit.
17
Raymond Hettinger9f1a6792005-07-31 01:16:36 +000018- The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
19 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
20 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
21
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +000022- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
23
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +000024- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
25 reference counts in some error exit cases.
26
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000027- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
28 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
29 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
30 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
31 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
32 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
33 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
34 realloc.
35
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +000036- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
37 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
38
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +000039- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
40 like their int counterparts.
41
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +000042- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
43 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
44 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
45 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
46 for a longer write-up of the problem).
47
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +000048- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
49 serializing floats.
50
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +000051- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
52 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
53 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
54
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +000055- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
56 278.
57
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +000058- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
59 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
60 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
61 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
62 to the base class has been moved the prroper nb_* magic slot and out of
63 PyNumber_*().
64 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
65
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +000066- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
67 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
68 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
69 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
70
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +000071- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
72 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
73 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
74 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
75 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
76
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +000077- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
78 disabled caused a crash.
79
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +000080- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
81 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
82
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000083- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000084 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
85
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +000086- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
87
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +000088- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +000089 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
90 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
91 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +000092
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +000093- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
94
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +000095- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
96 returning None.
97
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000098- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +000099 ('\') with a specific error message.
100
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +0000101- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
102
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +0000103- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
104 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
105
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000106- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000107 an ferror() call.
108
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000109- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
110 list.sort().
111
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000112- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
113 (2+3) --> (5).
114
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000115- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
116
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000117- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
118 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000119
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000120- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
121 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
122 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
123
Neil Schemenauercf52c072005-08-12 17:34:58 +0000124- Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a
125 unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and
126 calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance.
127
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000128Extension Modules
129-----------------
130
Martin v. Löwisebd9d5b2005-08-09 15:00:59 +0000131- Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
132 st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
133
Michael W. Hudson8137bea2005-07-27 20:24:40 +0000134- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
135 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
136 for large or negative values.
137
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000138- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000139 implemented treated all integer values except 1 as false.
140
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000141- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
142
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000143- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
144 if available on the platform.
145
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000146- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
147 available on the platform.
148
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000149- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
150 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
151
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000152- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
153
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000154- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
155 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
156 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
157
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000158- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
159
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000160- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
161 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
162
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000163- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000164 file size.
165
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000166- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
167
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000168- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
169 {remove_history,replace_history}
170
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000171- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
172 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000173
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000174- stat_float_times is now True.
175
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000176- array.array objects are now picklable.
177
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000178- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
179 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
180
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000181- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
182 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
183 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
184
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000185- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
186 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000187
188Library
189-------
190
Martin v. Löwisb813c532005-08-07 20:51:04 +0000191- Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
192
Georg Brandl649f8e72005-08-03 07:30:12 +0000193- Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
194 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
195
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000196- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
197 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
198 Tkdnd.
199
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000200- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
201 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
202
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000203- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
204 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
205
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000206- textwrap now processes text chucks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
207 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
208
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000209- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
210 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
211
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000212- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
213 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
214
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000215- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
216 though this can be missing in embedded interpreters
217
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000218- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
219
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000220- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
221 error messages.
222
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000223- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
224
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000225- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
226 Bug #1224621.
227
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000228- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
229 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
230 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
231 terminates by raising StopIteration.
232
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000233- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
234
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000235- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
236 component of the path.
237
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000238- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
239 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
240 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
241 class at all.
242
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000243- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
244 files to PyPI.
245
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000246- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
247 them to PyPI.
248
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000249- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
250 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
251 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
252 work as expected.
253
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000254- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
255 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
256
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000257- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000258 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
259
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000260- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
261
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000262- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
263 to build.
264
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000265- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
266 symbolic links on Windows.
267
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000268- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000269 profile.py if available.
270
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000271- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
272
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000273- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
274 in LWPCookieJar.
275
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000276- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
277
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000278- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
279
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000280- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
281
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000282- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
283
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000284- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
285
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000286- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
287
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000288- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
289
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000290- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
291
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000292- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
293 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
294 be exploited in various ways.
295
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000296- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
297
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000298- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
299
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000300- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
301
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000302- Enhancements to the csv module:
303
304 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000305 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000306 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000307 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
308 reporting.
309 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
310 dictates.
311 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000312 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000313 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000314 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
315 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000316 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
317 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000318 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000319 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
320 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
321 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
322 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
323 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
324 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
325 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
326 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
327 without first creating a dialect class.
328 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
329 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
330 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000331 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000332 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
333 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000334 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
335 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
336 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
337 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000338 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
339 This has been fixed.
340
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000341- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
342 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
343 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
344 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
345
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000346- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
347
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000348- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
349 (Bug #951915).
350
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000351- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
352 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
353 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
354 encoding alias table
355
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000356- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
357
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000358- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
359 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
360
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000361- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
362
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000363- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
364
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000365- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
366
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000367- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
368
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000369- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
370
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000371- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
372 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
373 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
374
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000375- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000376 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000377
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000378- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
379 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
380 tokenizer with very long source lines.
381
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000382- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
383 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
384
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000385- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
386 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000387
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000388- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
389 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
390
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000391- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
392 correctly.
393
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000394- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
395 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
396 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
397 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
398 between two lines.
399
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000400
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000401Build
402-----
403
Martin v. Löwis147fbe52005-08-07 21:09:30 +0000404- Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
405 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
406
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000407- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
408 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
409
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000410- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
411 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
412 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000413 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000414
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000415- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
416 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
417 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
418
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000419- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
420
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000421- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
422 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
423
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000424- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
425 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
426 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
427 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
428 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
429 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
430 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
431 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
432
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000433- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
434 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
435 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
436 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
437
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000438
439C API
440-----
441
Raymond Hettingerbeb31012005-08-16 03:47:52 +0000442- Added a C API for set and frozenset objects.
443
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000444- Removed PyRange_New().
445
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000446
447Tests
448-----
449
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000450- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000451
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000452
453Documentation
454-------------
455
Georg Brandlf13c4ba2005-08-02 10:28:08 +0000456- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
457
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000458- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
459
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000460- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
461
462- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
463
464- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
465
466- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
467
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000468- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
469 Closes bug #1166582.
470
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000471- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
472 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
473 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
474
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000475Mac
476---
477
478
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000479New platforms
480-------------
481
482- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
483
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000484
485Tools/Demos
486-----------
487
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000488- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
489
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000490- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000491
492
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000493What's New in Python 2.4 final?
494===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000495
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000496*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000497
498Core and builtins
499-----------------
500
501- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
502 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
503 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
504
505
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000506What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
507==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000508
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000509*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000510
511Core and builtins
512-----------------
513
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000514- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
515 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
516 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
517
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000518
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000519Library
520-------
521
522- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
523 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
524 raised is re-raised.
525
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000526- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
527 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
528
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000529- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
530 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
531 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
532 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
533 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
534 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
535 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
536 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
537 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
538 by the slice are recomputed now.
539
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000540- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000541
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000542Build
543-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000544
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000545- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
546 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
547 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000548
549C API
550-----
551
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000552- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
553
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000554
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000555What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
556================================
557
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000558*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000559
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000560License
561-------
562
563The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
564is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
565changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
566Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
567intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
568durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
569the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
570License::
571
572 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
573
574says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
575to Python 2.1.1.
576
577The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
578License Version 2.
579
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000580Core and builtins
581-----------------
582
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000583- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
584 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
585 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
586 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
587 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
588 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
589 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
590 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
591 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
592 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
593
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000594- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000595
596Extension Modules
597-----------------
598
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000599- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
600 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
601 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
602 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000603
604Library
605-------
606
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000607- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
608 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
609 returned.
610
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000611- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
612
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000613- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
614 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
615
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000616- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
617
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000618- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
619 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000620
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000621- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
622
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000623- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
624
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000625- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000626 the source code is updated and reloaded.
627
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000628Build
629-----
630
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000631- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000632
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000633What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
634================================
635
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000636*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000637
638Core and builtins
639-----------------
640
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000641- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000642 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
643
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000644- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
645 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
646 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
647 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
648
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000649- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
650 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
651
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000652- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
653 constant.
654
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000655- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
656 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
657 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
658 large), and to anomalies such as
659 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
660 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
661 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
662 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000663
664Extension modules
665-----------------
666
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000667- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
668 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000669 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
670 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
671 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000672
673Library
674-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000675
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000676- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000677 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000678 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
679 --swig-cpp.
680
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000681- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
682 it is set.
683
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000684- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000685
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000686- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
687 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
688 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
689 Closes bug #1039270.
690
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000691- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000692
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000693 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000694 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
695 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
696 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
697 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
698 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
699 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
700 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
701 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
702 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
703 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
704 + Updates to documentation.
705
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000706- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
707 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
708 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
709 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
710
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000711- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000712
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000713- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
714 applications should use the getmember function.
715
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000716- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
717
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000718- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
719 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
720 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
721 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
722 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
723 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
724 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
725 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
726 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
727
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000728- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
729 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000730 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000731
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000732- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
733 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
734 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
735 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
736 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
737 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
738 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
739 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000740
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000741- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
742 the new public features (of which there are many).
743
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000744- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000745 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
746 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
747 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
748 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000749 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000750
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000751- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
752
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000753- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
754 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
755 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
756 options.
757
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000758- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
759 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
760 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
761 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
762 conditions under which non-string values work.
763
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000764Build
765-----
766
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000767- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
768 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
769 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
770
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000771- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
772 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
773 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
774 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
775 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000776
777C API
778-----
779
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000780- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
781 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
782
783- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
784
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000785- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
786 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
787 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
788 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
789 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
790 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
791 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
792 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
793 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
794
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000795- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
796
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000797- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
798 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
799 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000800
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000801Tests
802-----
803
804- test__locale ported to unittest
805
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000806Mac
807---
808
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000809- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
810 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
811 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000812
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000813Tools/Demos
814-----------
815
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000816- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
817 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
818 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
819 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
820 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000821
822
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000823What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
824=================================
825
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000826*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000827
828Core and builtins
829-----------------
830
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000831- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000832 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
833
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000834- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
835 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
836 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
837 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
838 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
839 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
840 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
841 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000842 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
843 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
844 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
845 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
846 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000847
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000848- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
849 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
850 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
851 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
852 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
853
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000854- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
855
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000856- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
857 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
858
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000859- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
860 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
861 modified the list.
862
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000863- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
864 functions is now writable.
865
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000866- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
867 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
868 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
869 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
870
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000871- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
872 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
873 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
874 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
875 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000876
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000877- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
878 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
879
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000880Extension modules
881-----------------
882
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000883- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
884
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000885- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
886 data.
887
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000888- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
889 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
890 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
891 supposed to have been truncated away.
892
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000893- Added socket.socketpair().
894
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000895- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
896 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
897
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000898- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000899 versions of Python, have now been removed.
900
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000901Library
902-------
903
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000904- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000905 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000906
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000907- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
908 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
909
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000910- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
911 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
912
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000913- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
914
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000915- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
916 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000917
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000918- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
919 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
920
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000921- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
922
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000923- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
924
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000925- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
926
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000927- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
928 Percivall.
929
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000930- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
931 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
932
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000933- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
934 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
935 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000936 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000937
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000938- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
939 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
940 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
941 and exponent.
942
943- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
944
945- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +0000946 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000947 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
948
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000949- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
950 to the readline module.
951
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000952- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000953 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
954 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000955
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000956- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
957 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
958 contains symlinks.
959
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000960- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
961 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
962
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000963- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
964 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
965 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
966
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000967- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
968 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
969 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
970 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
971 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
972 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
973 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
974 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
975 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
976 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
977 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
978 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
979 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
980
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000981- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
982
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000983Tools/Demos
984-----------
985
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000986- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
987 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
988
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000989- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
990
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000991Build
992-----
993
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000994- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
995 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
996 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
997 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
998 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
999 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
1000 plans to do so.
1001
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +00001002- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
1003 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
1004
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +00001005- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
1006 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
1007
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001008- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
1009 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
1010
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +00001011- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
1012 GNU/k*BSD systems.
1013
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +00001014- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
1015 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
1016
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001017C API
1018-----
1019
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001020..
1021
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001022Documentation
1023-------------
1024
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001025- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1026 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1027
1028- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1029 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1030 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001031
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001032New platforms
1033-------------
1034
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001035- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1036
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001037Tests
1038-----
1039
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001040..
1041
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001042Windows
1043-------
1044
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001045- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1046 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1047 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1048 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1049 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1050 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1051 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1052 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1053 the problem.
1054
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001055Mac
1056---
1057
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001058..
1059
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001060
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001061What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1062=================================
1063
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001064*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001065
1066Core and builtins
1067-----------------
1068
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001069- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1070 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1071 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1072 sensitive code.
1073
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001074- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001075 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001076
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001077 @staticmethod
1078 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001079
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001080 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001081
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001082- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1083 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1084 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1085 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1086 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1087 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1088 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1089 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1090 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1091 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1092 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1093
1094 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1095 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1096 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1097 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1098 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1099 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1100 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1101
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001102- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1103 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1104
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001105- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001106 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001107
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001108- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001109 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001110 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1111
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001112- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001113 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1114 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1115
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001116- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1117 types that support garbage collection.
1118
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001119- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1120
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001121- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1122 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1123 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1124 Jython.
1125
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001126- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1127
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001128- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1129 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1130
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001131- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1132 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1133 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001134
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001135- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1136 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1137 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1138
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001139Extension modules
1140-----------------
1141
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001142- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1143
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001144Library
1145-------
1146
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001147- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1148 TIS-620
1149
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001150- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1151 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1152 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1153 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1154 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1155 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1156 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1157 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1158 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1159 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1160
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001161- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1162
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001163- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1164 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1165 same as when the argument is omitted).
1166 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1167
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001168- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1169
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001170- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1171 schemes are offered.
1172
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001173- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1174
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001175- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1176 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1177 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1178
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001179- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1180
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001181- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1182 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1183
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001184- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1185 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1186 when dummy_threading is being used.
1187
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001188- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1189 from a tarfile.
1190
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001191- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001192 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001193
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001194- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1195 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1196 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1197 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1198
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001199- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1200 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1201
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001202- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1203 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1204 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1205 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1206 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1207 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1208 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1209 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1210 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1211 by some other method in progress).
1212
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001213- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1214 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1215 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001216
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001217- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1218
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001219- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1220 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1221 AM Kuchling.
1222
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001223- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1224 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1225 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1226
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001227- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1228 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1229 instead of unsigned.
1230
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001231- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001232 no longer part of the public API.
1233
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001234- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1235 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1236 string methods of the same name).
1237
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001238- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001239 SF patch 945642.
1240
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001241- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1242
1243 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1244
1245 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1246 DocTestSuites.
1247
1248- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1249 that provide thread-local data.
1250
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001251- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1252 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1253
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001254- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1255
1256- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1257 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1258 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1259
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001260- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1261
1262 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1263 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1264 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001265
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001266 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1267 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1268 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1269 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1270
1271 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1272 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1273
1274 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1275 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1276 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1277 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1278
1279 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1280 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1281 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1282 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1283 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1284
1285 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1286 wrapping help output.
1287
1288 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1289 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1290 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001291
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001292C API
1293-----
1294
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001295- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1296 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1297 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1298 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1299 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1300 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1301 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1302 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1303 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1304 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1305 its visible semantics have not changed.
1306
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001307- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1308 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1309
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001310Documentation
1311-------------
1312
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001313- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001314
1315 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001316 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001317
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001318 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001319
1320 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1321
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001322- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001323
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001324Tests
1325-----
1326
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001327- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001328 platforms that use the Makefile.
1329
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001330- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1331 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1332 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1333
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001334
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001335What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1336=================================
1337
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001338*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001339
1340Core and builtins
1341-----------------
1342
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001343- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1344 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1345 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1346 objects now (one object instead of three).
1347
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001348- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1349 Windows DLLs.
1350
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001351- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1352 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001353
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001354- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1355 a new .pyc magic.
1356
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001357- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1358 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1359 be there.
1360
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001361- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1362 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1363 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1364
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001365- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1366 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1367 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1368
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001369- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1370
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001371- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1372 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1373 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001374
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001375- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1376 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1377
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001378- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1379
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001380- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001381 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001382
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001383- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1384
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001385- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1386
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001387- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1388 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1389
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001390- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1391 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1392 Fixes bug #858016 .
1393
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001394- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1395 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1396 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1397
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001398- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1399 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1400 improves their performance (about 35%).
1401
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001402- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1403 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1404 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1405
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001406- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1407 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1408 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1409 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1410
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001411- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1412 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001413 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001414 length is not known).
1415
1416- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1417 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001418 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1419 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001420 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1421
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001422- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1423 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1424
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001425- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1426 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1427 keyword arguments.
1428
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001429- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1430 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1431 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1432
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001433- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1434 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1435 cases.
1436
1437- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1438 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1439 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1440 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1441 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1442 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1443 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1444 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1445 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1446 a release build.
1447
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001448- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1449 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1450
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001451- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001452 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001453
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001454- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1455 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1456 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1457 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1458 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1459 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1460 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1461 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1462 destroyed.
1463
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001464- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1465 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1466 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1467 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1468 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1469 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1470 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1471 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1472
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001473- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1474 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1475 character other than a space.
1476
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001477- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1478 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1479 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1480 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1481 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1482 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1483 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1484 attributes with the same name.
1485
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001486- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1487 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1488 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1489 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1490 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1491 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1492 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1493 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1494 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1495 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1496 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1497 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1498 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1499 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001500
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001501- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1502 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1503 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1504 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1505 This has been repaired.
1506
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001507- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1508
1509- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1510
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001511- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1512 over a sequence.
1513
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001514- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001515 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001516
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001517- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1518
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001519- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1520 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1521 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1522 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1523 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1524 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1525 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1526 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1527
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001528- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1529 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1530 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1531
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001532- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1533 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1534 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1535 freelist.
1536
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001537- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1538 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1539
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001540- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1541 number.
1542
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001543- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1544 a TypeError exception.
1545
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001546- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1547 820195.
1548
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001549- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1550 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1551 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1552
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001553- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001554 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1555 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001556
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001557- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1558 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1559 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1560
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001561- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1562 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001563 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001564
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001565- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001566 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1567 the first call.
1568
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001569
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001570Extension modules
1571-----------------
1572
Georg Brandl33a5f2a2005-08-21 14:16:04 +00001573- Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines() for files containing one line without
1574 newlines.
1575
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001576- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1577 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1578
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001579- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1580 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1581 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1582 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1583 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1584 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1585 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001586
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001587- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1588
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001589- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1590
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001591- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1592 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1593
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001594- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1595 fewer false positives.
1596
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001597- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1598 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1599
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001600- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001601 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1602
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001603- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001604 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001605 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001606 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1607 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001608
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001609- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1610 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1611 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1612 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1613
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001614- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1615 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1616 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1617 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1618 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1619 #897625.
1620
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001621- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1622 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1623
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001624- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1625 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1626 and pops on either side of the deque.
1627
1628- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1629 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1630
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001631- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1632 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1633 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1634 other functions that expect a function argument.
1635
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001636- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1637
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001638- os.getsid was added.
1639
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001640- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1641 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1642 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1643
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001644- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1645
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001646- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1647
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001648- readline.clear_history was added.
1649
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001650- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1651
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001652- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1653
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001654- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1655
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001656- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1657
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001658- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1659
1660- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1661
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001662- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1663
1664- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1665
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001666- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1667 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1668 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1669
1670- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1671 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1672 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1673 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1674 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1675 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1676 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1677
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001678- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1679 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1680 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1681 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001682
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001683- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001684 iterators from a single iterable.
1685
1686- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1687 of raising a TypeError exception.
1688
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001689- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1690 as parameter.
1691
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001692Library
1693-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001694
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001695- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1696 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1697 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001698
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001699- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1700 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1701 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001702
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001703- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001704
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001705- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1706 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001707
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001708- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1709 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1710
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001711- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1712
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001713- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001714 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001715
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001716- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001717 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001718
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001719- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1720
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001721- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1722 on cygwin and mingw32.
1723
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001724- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1725
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001726- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1727 module.
1728
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001729- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1730 installation scheme for all platforms.
1731
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001732- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001733 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001734
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001735- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1736 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1737 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1738
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001739- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1740 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1741 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1742
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001743- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1744
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001745- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1746
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001747- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1748 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1749
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001750- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1751 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1752 type pattern with the same value exists.
1753
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001754- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1755 when run from the command prompt).
1756
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001757- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1758 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1759
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001760- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1761 default sort).
1762
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001763- Added global runctx function to profile module
1764
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001765- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1766
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001767- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1768
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001769- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1770
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001771- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001772 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1773 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1774 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1775 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1776 accordingly.
1777
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001778- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1779 decoding standards.
1780
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001781- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1782 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1783 called for all requests.
1784
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001785- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1786 they are passed to the compiler.
1787
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001788- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1789 indent, width and depth.
1790
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001791- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1792 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1793
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001794- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1795 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1796
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001797- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1798
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001799- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1800
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001801- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1802
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001803- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1804 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1805
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001806- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001807 for better performance.
1808
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001809- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001810
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001811- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1812 a string).
1813
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001814- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1815
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001816- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1817
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001818- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1819
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001820- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1821
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001822- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1823 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1824 list of fieldnames.
1825
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001826- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1827 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1828
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001829- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1830
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001831- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1832 empty lists.
1833
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001834- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1835 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1836 and shelves.
1837
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001838- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1839 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1840
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001841- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001842 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1843 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001844
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001845- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1846 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001847 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001848
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001849- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001850 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1851 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1852
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001853- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1854 and removed in Py2.4.
1855
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001856- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1857
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001858- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1859
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001860Tools/Demos
1861-----------
1862
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001863- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1864 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1865
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001866- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1867
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001868- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1869 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1870 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1871 destination in situations where both files are given.
1872
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001873- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1874 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1875 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1876 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1877
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001878- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1879
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001880- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1881 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1882 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1883 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1884 now.
1885
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001886- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1887 in effect
1888
1889- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1890 C-c C-h
1891
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001892- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1893 -d option was given.
1894
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001895Build
1896-----
1897
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001898- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1899 build under OS X.
1900
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001901- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1902 --enable-profiling.
1903
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001904- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1905 is configured --with-tsc.
1906
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001907- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1908 on AMD64.
1909
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001910- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1911 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1912
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001913- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1914 removed.
1915
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001916- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1917 supported (see PEP 11).
1918
1919- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1920
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001921- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1922
1923- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1924 (see PEP 11).
1925
1926- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1927 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1928
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001929C API
1930-----
1931
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001932- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1933 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1934 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1935
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001936- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1937 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1938 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1939 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1940
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001941- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1942 generator objects.
1943
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001944- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1945 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001946 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1947 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001948
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001949- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1950 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1951
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001952- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1953 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1954 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1955 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1956 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1957
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001958- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1959 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1960 about 10% faster.
1961
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001962- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1963 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1964
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001965- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1966 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1967 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1968 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1969
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001970Windows
1971-------
1972
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001973- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1974 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1975 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1976 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1977
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001978- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1979 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1980 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1981
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001982
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001983What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1984===============================
1985
1986*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1987
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001988IDLE
1989----
1990
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001991- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1992 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1993 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1994 context-menu actions.
1995
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001996- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1997 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1998 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1999 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
2000 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
2001 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
2002 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
2003 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
2004 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
2005
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002006
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002007What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
2008=============================================
2009
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00002010*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002011
2012Core and builtins
2013-----------------
2014
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002015- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002016 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002017 comment at the end are still unsupported.
2018
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002019Extension modules
2020-----------------
2021
2022- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
2023 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
2024 than once. This has been fixed.
2025
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002026- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2027 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2028 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2029 call.
2030
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002031- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2032
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002033Library
2034-------
2035
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002036- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2037 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2038
2039- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2040 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2041 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2042 restored.
2043
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002044IDLE
2045----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002046
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002047- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002048
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002049Build
2050-----
2051
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002052- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2053 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2054
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002055C API
2056-----
2057
2058Windows
2059-------
2060
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002061- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2062 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2063
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002064- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2065
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002066Mac
2067---
2068
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002069- Various fixes to pimp.
2070
2071- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2072
2073- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2074 more problems than it solves.
2075
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002076
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002077What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2078=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002079
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002080*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2081
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002082Core and builtins
2083-----------------
2084
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002085- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2086 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2087
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002088- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2089 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002090 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002091
2092- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2093 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2094 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002095 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002096
2097- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2098 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002099
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002100- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2101 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2102 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2103
2104- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002105 770247.
2106
2107- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002108
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002109Extension modules
2110-----------------
2111
2112- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2113 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2114
2115- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2116
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002117- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2118
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002119- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2120 contained within the _strptime module.
2121
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002122- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2123 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2124
2125- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002126 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2127
2128- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2129 the find_class attribute, if present.
2130
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002131- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002132
2133 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2134 (SF bug 763298).
2135
2136 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002137 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2138 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2139 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002140
2141 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2142
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002143Library
2144-------
2145
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002146- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2147
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002148- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2149 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2150 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2151 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2152 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2153 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2154 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2155 or Tester().
2156
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002157- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2158 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2159 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2160 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2161 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2162 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2163 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2164 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2165 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002166
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002167 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002168
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002169- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2170 weren't before was an oversight.
2171
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002172- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2173 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2174
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002175- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2176 when there are no lines.
2177
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002178- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2179 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2180
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002181- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2182 to child processes.
2183
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002184- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2185
2186- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2187
2188- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2189 xmlrpclib.
2190
2191- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2192 responses.
2193
2194- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2195 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2196
2197- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2198 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2199 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2200
2201- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2202 used as patterns.
2203
2204- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2205 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2206 than Tk 8.3.
2207
2208- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2209
2210- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002211
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002212Tools/Demos
2213-----------
2214
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002215- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2216
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002217- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2218
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002219- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002220
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002221Build
2222-----
2223
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002224- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2225
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002226- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2227
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002228- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2229 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002230
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002231- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2232 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2233 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002234
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002235C API
2236-----
2237
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002238- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2239 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2240
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002241Windows
2242-------
2243
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002244- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2245 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2246 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2247 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2248 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2249 Python exception ::
2250
2251 thread.error: can't start new thread
2252
2253 is raised now.
2254
2255- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2256 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2257 instead of from DLL teardown.
2258
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002259Mac
2260---
2261
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002262- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002263 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002264 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2265 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2266 the executable in the bundle.
2267
2268- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002269
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002270- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2271
2272- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2273 on Panther.
2274
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002275What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2276================================
2277
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002278*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002279
2280Core and builtins
2281-----------------
2282
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002283- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2284 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2285 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2286 with the -i option.
2287
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002288- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2289 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2290
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002291- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2292 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2293
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002294- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2295 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2296 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2297 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2298 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2299 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2300 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2301 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2302 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2303 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2304 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2305 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2306 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002307
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002308- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2309 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2310 embedded in a lambda expression.
2311
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002312- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2313 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2314 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2315 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2316 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2317
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002318- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2319 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2320 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2321
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002322- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2323 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2324
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002325- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2326 It's writable again.
2327
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002328- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2329 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2330 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002331 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002332
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002333- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2334 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2335 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2336
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002337Extension modules
2338-----------------
2339
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002340- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2341 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2342
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002343- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2344 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2345 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2346 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2347
2348- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2349 collection.
2350
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002351- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2352 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2353 unique within a single program run.
2354
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002355- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2356 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2357
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002358- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2359 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2360
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002361- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2362 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002363
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002364- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2365
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002366- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2367 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2368
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002369- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2370 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2371 for many BSD-derived systems.
2372
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002373
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002374Library
2375-------
2376
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002377- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2378 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2379 primary ones:
2380
2381 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2382 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2383 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2384
2385 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2386 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2387 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2388 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2389 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2390 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2391
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002392- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2393 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2394 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2395 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2396 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2397 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2398 argument.
2399
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002400- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2401 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2402 in the archive.
2403
2404- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2405 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2406
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002407- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2408 569574).
2409
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002410- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2411 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2412 no more.
2413
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002414- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2415 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2416 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2417 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2418 code coverage.
2419
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002420- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2421 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2422 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002423 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2424 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002425
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002426- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2427 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2428 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002429 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002430
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002431- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2432
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002433- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2434 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2435 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2436 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2437
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002438- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2439 handling.
2440
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002441- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2442 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2443
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002444- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2445 in socket.py.
2446
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002447- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2448
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002449- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2450 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2451 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2452 opener with proxy support.
2453
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002454- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2455
2456- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2457
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002458Tools/Demos
2459-----------
2460
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002461- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2462
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002463- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2464
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002465- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2466 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002467
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002468- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2469 files.
2470
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002471Build
2472-----
2473
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002474- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002475 different root directory.
2476
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002477C API
2478-----
2479
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002480- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2481 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2482 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2483 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2484 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2485 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2486 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2487 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2488 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2489 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2490
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002491- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2492 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2493 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2494 from Python.
2495
2496
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002497New platforms
2498-------------
2499
2500None this time.
2501
2502Tests
2503-----
2504
2505- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2506 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2507
2508Windows
2509-------
2510
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002511- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2512
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002513- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2514 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2515 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2516 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2517 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2518 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2519 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2520 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2521 that's what it's for.
2522
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002523Mac
2524---
2525
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002526- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2527 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2528 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2529 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002530- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2531 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2532- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002533
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002534SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2535------------------------------------
2536
2537430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2538598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2539622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2540661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2541683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2542697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2543713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2544724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2545727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2546729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2547730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2548731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2549732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2550733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2551735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2552740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2553744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2554745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2555747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2556749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2557751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2558753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2559755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2560757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2561760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2562
2563
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002564What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2565================================
2566
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002567*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002568
2569Core and builtins
2570-----------------
2571
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002572- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2573 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2574
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002575- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2576 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2577 and cannot be strings).
2578
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002579- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2580 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2581 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2582 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2583
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002584- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2585 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2586 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2587 Python itself.
2588
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002589- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2590 the referenced object, if it has one.
2591
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002592- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2593 the thread started at
2594 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2595
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002596- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2597 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2598 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2599 placed on a list index.
2600
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002601- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2602 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2603 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2604 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2605
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002606- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2607 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2608 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2609 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2610 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2611 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2612 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2613
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002614- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2615 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2616 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2617 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2618 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2619
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002620- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2621 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002622
2623- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2624 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2625 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2626 #693195.)
2627
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002628- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2629 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002630
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002631- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002632 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002633 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2634 interpreter executions, would fail.
2635
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002636- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002637 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002638 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002639
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002640Extension modules
2641-----------------
2642
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002643- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2644 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2645 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2646 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2647
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002648- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2649 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2650
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002651- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2652 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2653 and Greg Chapman.)
2654
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002655- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2656 recursively.
2657
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002658- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002659 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2660 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2661 leaks.
2662
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002663- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2664
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002665- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2666 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2667 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2668 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2669 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2670 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2671 #705836.
2672
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002673- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002674 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2675
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002676- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2677 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2678 See SF bug #692416.
2679
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002680- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2681 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2682
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002683- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2684 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2685 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002686
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002687- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002688 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2689 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2690
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002691- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2692 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2693 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2694 timeouts to work properly.
2695
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002696Library
2697-------
2698
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002699- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2700 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2701 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2702 future release.
2703
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002704- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2705 for querying platform dependent features.
2706
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002707- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002708
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002709- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2710 pickle protocol versions.
2711
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002712- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2713 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2714 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2715
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002716- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2717
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002718- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2719 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2720 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2721 modules.
2722
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002723- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2724 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2725 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2726
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002727- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2728 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2729
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002730- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2731 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2732 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2733
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002734- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002735 MS Office extensions.
2736
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002737- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2738 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2739
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002740- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2741 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2742
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002743- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2744 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2745 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2746 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2747 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2748 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2749
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002750- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2751 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2752 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002753
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002754- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2755 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2756 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2757
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002758- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2759
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002760- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2761 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2762 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2763
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002764Tools/Demos
2765-----------
2766
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002767- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2768 See the module docstring for details.
2769
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002770Build
2771-----
2772
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002773- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2774 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002775
2776C API
2777-----
2778
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002779- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2780
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002781- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2782 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2783 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2784
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002785- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2786 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002787
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002788 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2789 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2790 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002791
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002792- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002793 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2794
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002795- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2796 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2797 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002798
2799New platforms
2800-------------
2801
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002802None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002803
2804Tests
2805-----
2806
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002807- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2808 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002809
2810Windows
2811-------
2812
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002813- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2814 function.
2815
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002816- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2817 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002818
2819Mac
2820---
2821
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002822- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2823 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002824
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002825- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2826 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002827
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002828- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2829 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2830 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002831
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002832- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002833 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2834 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002835
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002836- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2837 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002838
2839
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002840What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2841=================================
2842
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002843*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002844
2845Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002846-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002847
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002848- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2849 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2850 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2851
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002852- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2853 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2854 (SF patch #664376.)
2855
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002856- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2857 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2858 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2859 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2860 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2861 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002862 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002863
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002864- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2865 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2866 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2867 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002868 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002869
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002870- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2871 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2872 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2873 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2874 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2875 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2876 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2877 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2878 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2879 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2880 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2881
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002882- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2883 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2884 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2885 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2886 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2887 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2888
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002889- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2890 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2891
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002892- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2893 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2894 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2895 case.)
2896
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002897- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2898 passed as unicode strings.
2899
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002900- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2901 See SF bug #683467.
2902
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002903- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2904 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2905
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002906- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2907
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002908- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2909
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002910- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2911 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2912 arguments.
2913
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002914- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2915 See SF bug #667147.
2916
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002917- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002918 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002919 See SF bug #676155.
2920
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002921- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002922 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002923 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2924 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2925 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2926 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2927 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2928 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002929
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002930Extension modules
2931-----------------
2932
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002933- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2934 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2935 tp_as_number pointer.
2936
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002937- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2938 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2939 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2940 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2941 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2942
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002943- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2944
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002945- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2946
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002947- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002948 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002949 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2950 patch #678531.)
2951
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002952- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2953 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2954
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002955- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2956 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2957
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002958- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2959
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002960- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2961 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2962 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2963
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002964- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2965
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002966- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2967 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2968
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002969- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002970
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002971- datetime changes:
2972
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002973 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2974
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002975 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2976 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2977 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2978 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2979 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2980 now.
2981
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002982 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002983 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2984 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002985
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002986 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002987 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002988 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2989 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2990 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2991 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002992
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002993 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2994 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2995 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002996 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2997
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002998 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2999 by a later example coded by Guido.
3000
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003001 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003002 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
3003 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
3004 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003005 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
3006 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
3007
3008 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
3009 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
3010 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
3011 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
3012 tzinfo subclass instance.
3013
3014 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
3015 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
3016 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
3017 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
3018 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
3019 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
3020 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
3021 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003022
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003023 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
3024 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3025 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3026 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3027 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003028 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3029
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003030 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003031
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003032 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3033 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3034 as a naive datetime object.
3035
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003036 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3037 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3038 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3039
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003040 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3041 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3042 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3043 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3044 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3045 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3046 comparison.
3047
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003048 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3049 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3050 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3051 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003052 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003053
3054 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003055
3056 and ::
3057
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003058 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3059
3060 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3061 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3062 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3063 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3064
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003065 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3066 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3067 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3068 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3069 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3070
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003071 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3072 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003073 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3074 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003075
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003076Library
3077-------
3078
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003079- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3080 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3081
3082- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3083 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3084 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3085 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3086 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3087 See PEP 307 for details.
3088
3089- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3090 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3091
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003092- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3093 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003094 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003095 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3096 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003097 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003098
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003099- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3100 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3101
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003102- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3103 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3104 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3105
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003106- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3107
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003108- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3109 exception.
3110
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003111- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3112 class.
3113
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003114- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3115 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3116 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3117
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003118- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3119 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3120
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003121- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003122 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3123 See SF bug #659228.
3124
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003125- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3126 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3127 See SF patch #651082.
3128
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003129- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003130
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003131- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3132 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3133
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003134- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003135 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003136
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003137- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3138 DOS paths from other platforms.
3139
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003140Tools/Demos
3141-----------
3142
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003143- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3144 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3145 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3146 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3147 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3148 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3149 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3150 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3151 example:
3152
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003153 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3154 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003155
3156 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3157
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003158
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003159Build
3160-----
3161
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003162- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3163 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3164 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003165 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3166
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003167 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3168
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003169- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3170 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3171 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3172 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3173 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3174 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3175 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3176 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3177 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3178
3179- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3180 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3181 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3182 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3183
3184- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3185 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3186
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003187C API
3188-----
3189
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003190- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3191 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003192
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003193- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3194 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3195 tp_as_number pointer.
3196
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003197- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3198 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3199 (SF #681367)
3200
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003201- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3202 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3203 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3204 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003205
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003206Tests
3207-----
3208
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003209- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003210 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3211 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3212 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3213 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3214 pydoc.)
3215
3216- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3217
3218- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003219
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003220Windows
3221-------
3222
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003223- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3224 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3225 time).
3226
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003227- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3228 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3229
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003230- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3231 release without strong cryptography.
3232
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003233- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003234 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003235
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003236- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3237 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3238
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003239Mac
3240---
3241
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003242- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3243 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003244
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003245- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3246 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3247 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003248
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003249- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3250 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003251
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003252- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3253 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3254 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3255 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003256
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003257- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003258 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3259 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3260 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003261
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003262
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003263What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003264=================================
3265
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003266*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003267
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003268Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003269--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003270
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003271- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3272
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003273- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3274 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003275 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003276 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003277 a different meaning than before.
3278
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003279- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003280 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003281 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003282
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003283- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003284 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003285 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003286
3287- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3288 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3289 and deallocation.
3290
3291- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3292 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3293
3294- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3295 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3296 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3297 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3298 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3299
3300- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3301 now detected by the garbage collector.
3302
3303- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3304 [SF bug 519621]
3305
3306- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3307 identifier.
3308
3309- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3310 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3311 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3312 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3313 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3314 [SF bug 563060]
3315
3316- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3317 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3318 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3319 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3320 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3321
3322- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3323 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3324 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3325
3326- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3327
3328- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3329 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3330 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3331 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3332 state of the slots would be lost.)
3333
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003334Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003335-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003336
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003337- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003338 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3339 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3340 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3341 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003342 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3343 Jython 2.1.
3344
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003345- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003346 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003347 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3348 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3349 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3350 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3351 these, see PEP 302.
3352
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003353- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3354 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3355 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3356
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003357- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3358 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3359 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3360
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003361- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3362 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3363 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3364
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003365- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3366 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3367 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3368 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3369 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3370 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3371 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3372 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3373 releases or implementations.
3374
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003375- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003376 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3377 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003378
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003379- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3380 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3381
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003382- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3383 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3384 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3385
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003386- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3387 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3388
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003389- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3390 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003391 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3392 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003393
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003394- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3395 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3396 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3397 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3398 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3399
3400 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3401 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3402 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3403 pattern.
3404
3405 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3406 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3407 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3408 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3409
3410 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3411 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3412 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3413 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3414 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3415 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3416
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003417- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3418 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3419 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3420 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3421 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3422 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3423 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3424 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003425
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003426- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3427 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3428 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3429 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3430 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003431 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3432 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3433 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3434 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3435 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3436 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3437 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003438
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003439- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3440 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3441
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003442- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3443 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3444 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3445 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3446 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3447 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3448 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3449 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3450 to Zack Weinberg!
3451
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003452- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3453 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3454 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3455 type. This has been fixed now.
3456
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003457- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3458 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3459 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3460
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003461- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3462 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3463 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3464 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3465 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3466 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3467 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3468 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003469 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003470
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003471- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3472 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3473 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003474
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003475- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3476 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3477 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3478 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3479 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3480 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3481 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3482 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003483 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003484 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3485 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3486
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003487- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3488 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3489 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3490 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3491 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3492 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3493 this.)
3494
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003495- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3496 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003497 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003498 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003499 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3500 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003501 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3502 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003503
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003504- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3505 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3506 currently running.
3507
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003508- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3509 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3510 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3511 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3512
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003513- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3514 as directory names.
3515
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003516- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3517 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3518
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003519- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3520 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3521
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003522- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003523 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3524 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003525
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003526- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3527 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3528 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3529 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3530 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3531
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003532- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3533 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3534 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3535 removed.
3536
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003537- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3538 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3539 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3540
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003541- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3542 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3543 to __debug__.
3544
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003545- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3546 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3547 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3548
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003549- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3550 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3551 deprecated now.
3552
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003553- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3554 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3555 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003556
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003557- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3558 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3559 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3560 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3561 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003562
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003563- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3564 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3565
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003566- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3567 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3568 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003569 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003570 is backward compatible.
3571
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003572- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3573 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3574 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3575 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3576 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3577
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003578- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3579 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3580 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3581 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3582 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3583 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003584
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003585- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3586 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3587
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003588- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3589 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3590
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003591- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3592 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3593 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3594 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3595 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3596
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003597- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3598 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3599 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3600
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003601- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003602 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3603
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003604- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3605 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3606 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003607
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003608- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3609 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3610
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003611- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3612 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3613 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3614
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003615- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3616
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003617Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003618-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003619
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003620- Added three operators to the operator module:
3621 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3622 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3623 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3624
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003625- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3626
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003627- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3628 archives.
3629
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003630- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3631 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3632 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3633
3634 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3635
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003636- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3637 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3638 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003639 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003640
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003641- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3642 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3643 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3644 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003645 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3646 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3647 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3648 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003649
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003650- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3651 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003652
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003653- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3654
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003655- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3656 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3657
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003658- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3659 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3660 supported.
3661
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003662- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3663
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003664- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3665 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003666
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003667- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3668 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3669
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003670- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3671
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003672- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3673 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3674
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003675- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3676 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3677 functions but callable type objects.
3678
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003679- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003680 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003681 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003682
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003683- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3684 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003685
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003686- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3687 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003688
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003689- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3690 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3691 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3692 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3693
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003694- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3695 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003696
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003697- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3698 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3699 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3700 and __imul__.
3701
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003702- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003703 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3704 is called.
3705
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003706- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3707 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3708 interpreter was compiled.
3709
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003710- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3711 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3712 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003713 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003714 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3715 1, not 2.
3716
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003717- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3718 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3719 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3720 limit.
3721
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003722- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3723 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3724 bug #623464.
3725
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003726- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3727 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3728 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3729 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3730
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003731Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003732-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003733
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003734- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3735
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003736- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3737 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3738 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3739 with Python 2.3a2.
3740
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003741- os.path exposes getctime.
3742
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003743- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003744 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003745 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003746 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003747 unit tests of floating point results.
3748
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003749- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3750 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3751 has been increased.
3752
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003753- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3754 executed.
3755
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003756- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3757 postinstallation script.
3758
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003759- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3760 test the current module.
3761
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003762- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003763 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3764 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3765 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3766 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3767
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003768- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003769 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003770 Ward's Optik package.
3771
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003772- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3773 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3774 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3775 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3776
3777- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3778 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003779 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003780
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003781- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3782 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3783 shelf are binary pickles.
3784
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003785- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3786 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3787
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003788- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3789 modules are iterators now.
3790
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003791- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3792 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3793 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3794 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3795 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3796 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003797
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003798- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3799 with their entity value.
3800
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003801- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3802
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003803- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3804 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003805
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003806- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3807 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003808 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003809
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003810- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3811 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3812 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3813 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3814 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3815 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3816 main():
3817
3818 import locale
3819 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3820
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003821- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3822 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3823
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003824- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3825 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3826 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3827 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3828 to the new standard.
3829
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003830- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3831 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3832 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3833 an extension to the database.
3834
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003835- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3836 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3837 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3838 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003839 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003840
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003841- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003842 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003843
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003844- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3845 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3846 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3847 bounded integers.
3848
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003849- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3850 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3851 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3852 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3853 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3854 in existence.
3855
3856 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3857 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3858 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3859 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3860 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3861 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3862
3863 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3864 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3865 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3866 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3867
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003868- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3869 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3870 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3871
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003872- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3873
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003874- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3875 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3876 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3877 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3878
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003879- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3880 argument.
3881
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003882- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3883 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3884 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3885 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3886 [SF patch 560794].
3887
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003888- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3889 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3890 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003891 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3892 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3893 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003894
3895- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3896 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003897
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003898- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3899 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3900 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3901 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003902
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003903- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3904 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3905 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3906 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3907 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3908
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003909- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003910
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003911- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3912
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003913- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3914 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3915 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3916 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3917 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3918 identical to None.
3919
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003920- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3921 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3922 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3923 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3924 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3925 results now.
3926
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003927- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3928 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3929
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003930- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3931 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3932 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3933 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3934 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3935 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3936 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3937 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3938
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003939- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3940
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003941- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3942 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3943
3944- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3945 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3946 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3947 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3948 and other systems.
3949
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003950- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3951 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3952 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3953 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 +00003954 work well with these.
3955
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003956- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3957
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003958- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003959 connections.
3960
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003961- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3962 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3963 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3964
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003965- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3966 sets
3967
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003968- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3969 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3970 name.
3971
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003972- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3973 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3974 passed in.
3975
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003976- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003977 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003978 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3979 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003980
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003981- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3982
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003983- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3984
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003985- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3986 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3987 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3988
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003989- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3990 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3991 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3992 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003993 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003994
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003995- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003996 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003997 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003998
3999- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
4000 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
4001 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
4002
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004003- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00004004 the value of its expression argument.
4005
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004006- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
4007 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
4008 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
4009
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00004010- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
4011 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
4012 skipstone browser was included.
4013
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00004014- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
4015 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
4016
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004017Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004018-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004019
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00004020- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
4021 names in addition to accepting file names.
4022
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00004023- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
4024 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4025 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4026 still used and useful.)
4027
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004028- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4029 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4030 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4031 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004032
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004033- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4034 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4035 the generated binary.
4036
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004037Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004038-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004039
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004040- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4041
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004042- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4043 except in the hands of experts.
4044
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004045- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004046 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4047 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4048 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004049
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004050- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4051 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4052 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4053 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4054 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4055 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4056 builds.
4057
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004058- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4059 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4060 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4061 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4062 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4063 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4064 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4065 new type.
4066
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004067- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004068
4069 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4070 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4071 positive infinities.
4072
4073 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4074 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4075 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4076 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4077 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4078 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4079 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4080
4081 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4082
4083 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4084
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004085- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4086 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4087 size of the executable.
4088
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004089- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4090 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4091 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4092 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004093
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004094- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4095
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004096- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4097 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4098 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004099
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004100- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4101 well as Unix.
4102
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004103- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4104 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4105 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4106 modules in the README file for details.
4107
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004108C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004109-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004110
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004111- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4112 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004113 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004114 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004115 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004116
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004117- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4118 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4119 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4120 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4121 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4122 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004123 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004124 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4125 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4126 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4127 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4128 aligned.)
4129
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004130- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4131 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4132 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4133
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004134- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4135 level.
4136
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004137- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4138 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4139 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4140 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4141 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4142
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004143- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4144 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4145 code.
4146
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004147- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4148 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4149 adjusting for negative indices.
4150
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004151- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4152 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4153 object.
4154
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004155- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4156 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4157 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4158
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004159- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4160 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004161
4162- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4163
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004164- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4165 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4166 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4167 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4168
4169- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4170
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004171- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004172
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004173- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004174 without going through the buffer API.
4175
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004176- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004177
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004178- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4179 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4180 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4181 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4182
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004183- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4184 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4185
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004186- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004187 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4188
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004189New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004190-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004191
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004192- OpenVMS is now supported.
4193
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004194- AtheOS is now supported.
4195
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004196- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4197
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004198- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4199
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004200Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004201-----
4202
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004203- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4204 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4205 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004206
4207Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004208-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004209
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004210- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4211 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4212 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4213 bugs.
4214 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004215 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004216 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4217 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004218 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004219
4220- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004221 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004222
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004223- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4224 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4225
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004226- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4227 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004228 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004229 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4230
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004231- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4232 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4233 use files" uninstall option).
4234
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004235- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4236
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004237- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4238 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4239
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004240- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4241 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4242 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4243
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004244- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4245 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4246 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4247 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4248 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004249 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4250 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4251 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004252
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004253- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004254 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004255 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4256 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4257 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4258 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4259 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4260 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4261 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4262 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4263 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4264 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4265 work around.
4266
4267- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4268 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4269 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4270 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4271 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4272 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4273 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4274 specified with O_CREAT too).
4275
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004276Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004277----
4278
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004279- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004280
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004281- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4282 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4283 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4284
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004285- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4286 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4287 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4288
4289- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4290 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4291 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4292 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4293 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4294 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4295 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4296 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004297
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004298- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4299 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4300 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004301
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004302- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4303 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4304 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4305 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4306 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004307
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004308- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4309 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4310 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004311
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004312- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4313 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004314
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004315- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4316 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4317 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4318 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4319 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004320
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004321- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4322 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4323 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4324
4325- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4326 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4327 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004328
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004329- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4330 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4331 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4332 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004333 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004334
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004335- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4336 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004337
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004338- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4339 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004340
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004341- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004342 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004343 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4344 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004345
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004346
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004347What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004348===============================
4349
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004350*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4351
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004352Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004353--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004354
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004355- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4356 with a custom metaclass.
4357
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004358Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004359-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004360
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004361- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4362 are proxies.
4363
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004364Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004365-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004366
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004367- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4368 very short strings.
4369
4370- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4371 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4372 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4373 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4374 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4375
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004376Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004377-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004378
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004379- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4380 close or delete time).
4381
4382- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4383 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4384
4385- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4386
4387- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004388 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004389
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004390Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004391-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004392
4393Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004394-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004395
4396C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004397-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004398
4399New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004400-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004401
4402Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004403-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004404
4405Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004406-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004407
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004408- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4409
4410- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4411 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4412
4413- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4414 deleted at process exit time.
4415
4416- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4417 in backslash.
4418
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004419Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004420----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004421
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004422- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4423 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4424 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4425
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004426
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004427What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004428===========================
4429
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004430*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4431
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004432Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004433--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004434
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004435- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4436 been extensively updated. See
4437
4438 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4439
4440 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4441
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004442- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4443 deleted!
4444
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004445- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4446 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4447 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4448 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4449 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4450
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004451- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4452
4453 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4454 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4455
4456 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4457 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4458 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4459 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4460 supported anyway.
4461
4462 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4463 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4464
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004465- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4466 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4467 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4468 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4469 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004470
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004471- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4472 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4473 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4474
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004475Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004476-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004477
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004478- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4479 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4480 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4481 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4482 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4483 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004484 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4485 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4486 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4487 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004488
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004489- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4490 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4491 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4492
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004493Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004494-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004495
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004496- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4497
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004498Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004499-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004500
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004501- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4502 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4503 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4504 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4505 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4506 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4507
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004508- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4509
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004510- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4511
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004512- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4513
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004514- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4515 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4516 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4517
4518- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4519
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004520Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004521-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004522
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004523- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4524 off a search on Google.
4525
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004526Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004527-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004528
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004529- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4530 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4531 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4532 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4533 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4534 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4535 other platforms should do likewise.
4536
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004537- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4538 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4539 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4540
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004541C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004542-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004543
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004544- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4545 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4546 producing key-value pairs.
4547
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004548- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004549 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004550 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4551 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4552 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4553 previously went unchallenged.
4554
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004555New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004556-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004557
4558Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004559-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004560
4561Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004562-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004563
4564Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004565----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004566
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004567- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4568 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004569
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004570- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4571 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4572 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4573 home.
4574
4575
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004576What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004577===========================
4578
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004579*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4580
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004581Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004582--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004583
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004584- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4585 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004586
4587 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004588 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004589
4590 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4591 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004592 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004593 This needs to be documented.
4594
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004595- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4596 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4597
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004598- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4599 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4600 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4601
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004602- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4603 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4604
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004605- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4606 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4607 class forbids it).
4608
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004609- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4610 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4611 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4612
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004613- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4614
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004615Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004616-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004617
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004618- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4619 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004620 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004621
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004622- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4623 (like 1 + '').
4624
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004625Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004626-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004627
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004628- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4629 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4630 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4631 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004632 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004633 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4634
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004635- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4636 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4637 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4638 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4639
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004640- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4641 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004642 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4643 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4644 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004645
4646- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4647 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004648
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004649- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4650 bytes on its input.
4651
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004652Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004653-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004654
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004655- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004656 convenience function.
4657
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004658- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4659 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4660 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004661 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4662 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4663 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4664 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4665 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4666 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004667
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004668- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4669 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4670 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4671 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4672
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004673- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4674 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4675 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4676
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004677- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4678 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4679 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4680 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4681
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004682- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4683 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004684 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004685 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4686 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4687 new -l and -e options.
4688
4689- statcache is now deprecated.
4690
4691- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4692 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004693 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004694 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4695 time properly taken into account.
4696
4697- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4698 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4699 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4700 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4701
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004702Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004703-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004704
4705Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004706-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004707
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004708- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4709 is built with libdb3 if available.
4710
4711- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4712
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004713C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004714-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004715
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004716- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4717 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4718 PySequence_Size().
4719
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004720- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4721
4722- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4723 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4724 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4725
4726- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4727 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4728
4729- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4730 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4731
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004732New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004733-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004734
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004735- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4736 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4737
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004738- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4739 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4740
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004741- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4742
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004743Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004744-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004745
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004746- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4747 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4748
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004749Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004750-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004751
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004752Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004753----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004754
4755- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4756 removed completely in the next release.
4757
4758- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4759 OSX.
4760
4761- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4762 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4763
4764- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4765
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004766
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004767What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004768===========================
4769
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004770*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4771
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004772Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004773--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004774
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004775- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004776 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004777 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004778 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4779 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004780 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4781 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004782 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4783 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004784
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004785- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4786 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4787
4788- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4789 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4790
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004791Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004792-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004793
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004794- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4795 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4796 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4797 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4798 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4799 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4800 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4801 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4802
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004803- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4804 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4805 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4806 example).
4807
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004808- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004809 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004810 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004811 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004812
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004813- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4814 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4815 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004816 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004817
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004818- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4819 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4820 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4821 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4822 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4823 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4824
4825 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4826
4827 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4828
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004829Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004830-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004831
4832- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4833
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004834- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4835
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004836- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4837 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004838
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004839- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4840 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4841 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4842 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4843 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4844 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004845 attributes.
4846
4847- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4848 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4849 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004850
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004851- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4852 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4853 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004854
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004855- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4856 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4857 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004858 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4859 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4860
4861- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4862 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004863
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004864Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004865-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004866
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004867- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4868 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4869
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004870- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4871 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4872 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4873 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4874
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004875- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4876 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4877 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4878 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4879
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004880 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4881 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4882 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4883 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4884 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4885 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4886 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4887 without losing information).
4888
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004889- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004890 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4891 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4892 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4893 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4894 module).
4895
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004896 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004897 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4898 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4899 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4900 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004901
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004902- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004903 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4904 encoding.
4905
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004906- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4907 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4908
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004909- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004910 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4911
4912- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4913 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4914 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4915 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4916
4917- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4918
4919- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4920 ON, and OFF.
4921
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004922- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4923 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4924
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004925Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004926-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004927
4928- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4929 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4930 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004931
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004932- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4933 been added: -X and -E.
4934
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004935Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004936-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004937
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004938- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4939 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4940
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004941C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004942-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004943
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004944- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4945 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4946 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4947 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4948 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4949
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004950- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4951 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4952 as long) arguments.
4953
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004954- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4955 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4956 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4957 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4958 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4959 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4960
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004961- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4962 input.
4963
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004964New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004965-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004966
4967Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004968-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004969
4970Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004971-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004972
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004973- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4974 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4975 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4976
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004977- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4978 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4979 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004980 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004981
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004982 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4983 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4984 import signal
4985 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004986
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004987 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004988 while 1:
4989 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004990 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004991 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4992 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4993 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4994 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004995
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004996
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004997What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4998===========================
4999
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005000*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
5001
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005002Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005003--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005004
5005- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
5006 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
5007 documentation for all operations on list objects.
5008
5009- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
5010 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
5011 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
5012 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
5013 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
5014 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
5015 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005016
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005017- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005018 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005019 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
5020 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
5021 associate a docstring with a property.
5022
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005023- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
5024 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5025 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5026 other built-in object types.
5027
5028- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5029 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5030 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5031 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5032 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5033
5034- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5035 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5036
5037- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5038 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005039 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005040 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5041 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5042 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5043 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5044 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5045
5046- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5047 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5048 class.
5049
5050- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5051 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5052 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5053 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5054
5055- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5056 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5057 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5058 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5059
5060- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5061 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5062
5063- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5064 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5065 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5066 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5067 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005068 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005069 with the same value as s.
5070
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005071- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5072
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005073Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005074----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005075
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005076- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5077
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005078- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5079 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5080 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5081 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5082 objects.
5083
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005084- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5085 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005086 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5087 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5088
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005089- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5090 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5091 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5092
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005093Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005094-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005095
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005096- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5097 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5098 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5099 by the instances.
5100
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005101- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5102 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5103 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5104
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005105- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5106 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5107 before the entire comparison is complete.
5108
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005109- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5110 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5111 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5112
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005113- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5114 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5115 getwriter().
5116
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005117- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5118 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5119
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005120- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005121 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5122 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5123
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005124- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5125 iterable object.
5126
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005127- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5128 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005129
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005130- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5131 authentication.
5132
5133- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5134 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005135
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005136- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005137 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5138 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5139 a sample driver.)
5140
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005141Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005142-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005143
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005144- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5145 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5146 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5147 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5148 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5149 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5150 kernel has large file support.
5151
5152- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5153 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5154 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5155 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5156 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5157
5158- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5159 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5160 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5161
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005162C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005163-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005164
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005165- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5166 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5167
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005168New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005169-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005170
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005171- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5172 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5173
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005174Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005175-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005176
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005177- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5178 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5179 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5180 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5181 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5182
5183- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5184 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5185 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5186 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5187
5188- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5189 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5190
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005191Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005192-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005193
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005194- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005195 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5196 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005197
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005198
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005199What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5200===========================
5201
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005202*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5203
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005204Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005205----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005206
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005207- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5208 big to represent as a C double.
5209
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005210- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5211 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5212 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5213 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5214 restriction).
5215
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005216- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5217 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5218 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5219 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5220 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5221
5222 >>> dir([])
5223 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5224 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5225 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5226 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5227 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5228 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5229 'reverse', 'sort']
5230
5231 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5232
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005233- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005234 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5235 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5236 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5237 OverflowError exception.
5238
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005239- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005240 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005241 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5242 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5243 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5244 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5245 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005246 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005247 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5248 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5249
5250 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5251 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5252 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5253 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005254
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005255- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005256 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5257 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5258 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5259 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5260 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5261 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5262 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5263 once it is created.
5264
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005265- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5266 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5267 (key, value) pairs.
5268
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005269- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005270 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5271 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5272
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005273- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5274 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5275 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5276 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5277 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005278
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005279- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005280 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5281 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5282
5283 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5284
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005285- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005286 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5287
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005288Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005289-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005290
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005291- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005292 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5293 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005294
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005295- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5296 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5297 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5298 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5299 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5300 in this area anymore).
5301
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005302- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5303 threading.Timer.
5304
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005305- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5306 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5307
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005308- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005309 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5310
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005311- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005312 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5313 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5314 converted to Python longs.
5315
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005316- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005317 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5318
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005319- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5320 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5321 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5322
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005323Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005324-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005325
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005326- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5327 division operators as per PEP 238.
5328
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005329Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005330-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005331
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005332- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5333 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5334 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5335 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5336
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005337C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005338-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005339
5340- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005341
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005342- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5343 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005344 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005345
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005346 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5347 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005348 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005349 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005350
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005351- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005352 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5353 module:
5354
5355 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005356
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005357 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5358 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005359
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005360 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5361 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005362
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005363 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5364
5365 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5366
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005367- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005368 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5369 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5370 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005371
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005372New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005373-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005374
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005375- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5376 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5377 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5378 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5379 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005380
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005381Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005382-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005383
5384Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005385-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005386
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005387- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5388 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5389 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5390 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005391 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5392 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5393 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5394 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5395 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005396
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005397- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005398 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5399
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005400
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005401What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5402===========================
5403
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005404*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5405
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005406Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005407-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005408
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005409- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5410 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5411
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005412- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5413 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5414 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005415
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005416- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5417 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5418 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5419 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005420
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005421- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5422
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005423- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005424
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005425Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005426-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005427
5428- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005429 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005430 the module docstring for details.
5431
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005432Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005433-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005434
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005435- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005436 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5437 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5438 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005439
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005440- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5441 Nick Mathewson.
5442
5443Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005444----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005445
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005446- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5447 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5448 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5449 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5450 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5451 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5452 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5453 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5454
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005455- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5456 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5457 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5458 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5459
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005460- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5461 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5462 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5463 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5464 come a long way).
5465
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005466- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5467 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5468 write filters for these warnings).
5469
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005470- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5471 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5472 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5473 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5474 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5475
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005476- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5477 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5478 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5479 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5480 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5481 older distribution.
5482
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005483Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005484-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005485
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005486- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5487 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005488 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005489
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005490- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5491 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5492 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5493
5494- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5495
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005496- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5497
5498- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5499
5500- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5501
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005502- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005503
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005504- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5505
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005506New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005507-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005508
5509C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005510-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005511
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005512- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5513 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5514 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5515 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5516 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5517 against buffer overruns.
5518
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005519- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005520 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5521 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005522 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5523 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5524 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5525
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005526- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5527 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5528 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5529 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5530 deprecated.
5531
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005532Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005533-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005534
5535- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5536 relevant is found.
5537
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005538
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005539What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005540===========================
5541
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005542*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5543
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005544Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005545----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005546
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005547- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5548 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5549 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5550 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5551 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5552 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5553 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5554 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005555 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005556 repaired.
5557
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005558- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005559 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005560 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5561 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5562 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5563 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5564 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5565 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5566 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5567 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5568
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005569- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5570 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5571 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5572 leading BMO character).
5573
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005574- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5575 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5576 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5577
5578 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5579 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5580 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005581
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005582 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5583 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5584 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5585 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5586 for various simple to use conversions.
5587
5588 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5589 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5590
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005591 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5592 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5593 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5594 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5595 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5596 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5597 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5598 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5599 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5600 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5601 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5602 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5603 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5604 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5605 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005606
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005607- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5608 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5609 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005610 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005611 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005612
5613 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005614 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5615 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5616 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5617 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5618 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005619 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5620 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005621
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005622 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5623 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5624 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005625 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005626
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005627- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5628 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5629 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5630 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5631 floating arithmetic,
5632
5633 x = 9007199254740992.0
5634 print long(x)
5635
5636 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5637 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5638 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5639 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5640 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5641 functions are of good quality).
5642
5643 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5644 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5645 algorithms to break.
5646
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005647- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5648 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5649 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5650 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5651 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5652 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5653 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5654 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5655 order.
5656
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005657- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5658 operation along the most common code paths.
5659
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005660- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5661 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5662
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005663- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5664 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5665 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5666 {}.update(UserDict())
5667
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005668- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5669 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5670 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5671 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5672 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5673 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5674 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5675 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5676
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005677- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005678 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005679
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005680 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005681 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5682 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005683 join() method of strings
5684 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005685 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5686 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005687 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005688 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005689
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005690- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5691 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5692
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005693- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5694 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5695
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005696- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5697 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5698 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5699 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5700
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005701- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5702 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005703 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005704 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5705 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005706
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005707- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5708
5709
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005710Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005711-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005712
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005713- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005714 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005715 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5716 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5717
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005718- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5719 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5720
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005721- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5722 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5723 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5724 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5725
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005726- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5727 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5728 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5729
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005730- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5731
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005732- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5733
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005734- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5735 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5736 that are still imported into string.py).
5737
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005738- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5739
5740- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5741 Now it does.
5742
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005743- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5744
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005745- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5746 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5747 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5748 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5749 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005750 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5751 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005752
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005753- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5754 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5755 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5756 'help(object)'.
5757
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005758Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005759-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005760
5761- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005762 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005763 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5764 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5765
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005766- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005767 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5768 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005769
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005770C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005771-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005772
5773- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5774 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005775
5776----
5777
5778**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**