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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2006*
11
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000012Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Martin v. Löwis18e16552006-02-15 17:27:45 +000015- PEP 353: Using ssize_t as the index type.
16
Neal Norwitzfc76d632006-01-10 06:03:13 +000017- Patch #1400181, fix unicode string formatting to not use the locale.
18 This is how string objects work. u'%f' could use , instead of .
19 for the decimal point. Now both strings and unicode always use periods.
20
Neal Norwitz671b9e32006-01-09 07:07:12 +000021- Bug #1244610, #1392915, fix build problem on OpenBSD 3.7 and 3.8.
22 configure would break checking curses.h.
23
Georg Brandlcd4d1e82005-12-27 17:37:07 +000024- Bug #959576: The pwd module is now builtin. This allows Python to be
25 built on UNIX platforms without $HOME set.
26
Neal Norwitzc10978f2005-12-19 06:07:16 +000027- Bug #1072182, fix some potential problems if characters are signed.
28
Neal Norwitz5d0ad502005-12-19 04:27:42 +000029- Bug #889500, fix line number on SyntaxWarning for global declarations.
30
Neal Norwitzdb83eb32005-12-18 05:29:30 +000031- Bug #1378022, UTF-8 files with a leading BOM crashed the interpreter.
32
Neal Norwitze7214a12005-12-18 05:03:17 +000033- Support for converting hex strings to floats no longer works.
34 This was not portable. float('0x3') now raises a ValueError.
35
Barry Warsaw2a38a862005-12-18 01:27:35 +000036- Patch #1382163: Expose Subversion revision number to Python. New C API
37 function Py_GetBuildNumber(). New attribute sys.build_number. Build number
38 is now displayed in interactive prompt banner.
39
Georg Brandlfa166682005-12-17 21:45:17 +000040- Implementation of PEP 341 - Unification of try/except and try/finally.
41 "except" clauses can now be written together with a "finally" clause in
Neal Norwitz11ca77e2005-12-17 22:24:12 +000042 one try statement instead of two nested ones. Patch #1355913.
Georg Brandlfa166682005-12-17 21:45:17 +000043
Hye-Shik Chang835b2432005-12-17 04:38:31 +000044- Bug #1379994: Builtin unicode_escape and raw_unicode_escape codec
45 now encodes backslash correctly.
46
Martin v. Löwisb45b3152005-11-28 17:34:23 +000047- Patch #1350409: Work around signal handling bug in Visual Studio 2005.
48
Georg Brandlf06e30a2005-11-24 15:37:42 +000049- Bug #1281408: Py_BuildValue now works correct even with unsigned longs
50 and long longs.
51
Neal Norwitz67715f02005-11-09 06:59:35 +000052- SF Bug #1350188, "setdlopenflags" leads to crash upon "import"
53 It was possible dlerror() returns a NULL pointer, use a default error
54 message in this case.
55
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +000056- Replaced most Unicode charmap codecs with new ones using the
57 new Unicode translate string feature in the builtin charmap
58 codec; the codecs were created from the mapping tables available
59 at ftp.unicode.org and contain a few updates (e.g. the Mac OS
60 encodings now include a mapping for the Apple logo)
61
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +000062- Added a few more codecs for Mac OS encodings
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +000063
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +000064- Speed up some Unicode operations.
65
66- A new AST parser implementation was completed.
67
Neal Norwitzb6570f52005-10-21 06:26:10 +000068- SF bug #1167751: fix incorrect code being for generator expressions.
Neal Norwitz16af7342005-10-21 06:25:33 +000069 The following code now raises a SyntaxError: foo(a = i for i in range(10))
70
Neal Norwitz708e51a2005-10-03 04:48:15 +000071- SF Bug #976608: fix SystemError when mtime of an imported file is -1.
72
Neal Norwitz11bd1192005-10-03 00:54:56 +000073- SF Bug #887946: fix segfault when redirecting stdin from a directory.
74 Provide a warning when a directory is passed on the command line.
75
Neal Norwitz40d37812005-10-02 01:48:49 +000076- Fix segfault with invalid coding.
77
78- SF bug #772896: unknown encoding results in MemoryError.
79
Raymond Hettinger6b27cda2005-09-24 21:23:05 +000080- All iterators now have a Boolean value of true. Formerly, some iterators
81 supported a __len__() method which evaluated to False when the iterator
82 was empty.
83
Guido van Rossum630db602005-09-20 18:49:54 +000084- On 64-bit platforms, when __len__() returns a value that cannot be
85 represented as a C int, raise OverflowError.
86
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000087- test__locale is skipped on OS X < 10.4 (only partial locale support is
Walter Dörwald6611a8b2005-10-09 19:28:35 +000088 present).
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000089
Georg Brandl80bbf3f2005-09-14 19:38:29 +000090- SF bug #893549: parsing keyword arguments was broken with a few format
91 codes.
92
Guido van Rossum8ee3e5a2005-09-14 18:09:42 +000093- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on AIX 5.3
94 with IBM's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1284289). This also closes SF
95 bug #105470: test_pwd fails on 64bit system (Opteron).
96
Guido van Rossum539c6622005-09-14 17:49:54 +000097- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on HP-UX 11 on
98 Itanium2 with HP's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1225212).
99
Georg Brandl4550b8d2005-08-26 06:43:52 +0000100- Disallow keyword arguments for type constructors that don't use them
Georg Brandl02c42872005-08-26 06:42:30 +0000101 (fixes bug #1119418).
102
Martin v. Löwisd35edda2005-08-24 08:39:24 +0000103- Forward UnicodeDecodeError into SyntaxError for source encoding errors.
104
Barry Warsawe2eca0b2005-08-15 18:14:19 +0000105- SF bug #900092: When tracing (e.g. for hotshot), restore 'return' events for
106 exceptions that cause a function to exit.
107
Raymond Hettinger9f1a6792005-07-31 01:16:36 +0000108- The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
109 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
110 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
111
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +0000112- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
113
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +0000114- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
115 reference counts in some error exit cases.
116
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000117- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
118 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
119 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
120 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
121 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
122 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
123 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
124 realloc.
125
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +0000126- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
127 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
128
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +0000129- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
130 like their int counterparts.
131
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +0000132- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
133 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
134 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
135 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
136 for a longer write-up of the problem).
137
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +0000138- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
139 serializing floats.
140
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +0000141- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
142 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
143 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
144
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +0000145- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
146 278.
147
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000148- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
149 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
150 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
151 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000152 to the base class has been moved to the proper nb_* magic slot and out of
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000153 PyNumber_*().
154 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
155
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +0000156- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
157 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
158 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
159 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
160
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +0000161- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
162 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
163 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
164 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
165 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
166
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +0000167- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
168 disabled caused a crash.
169
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000170- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
171 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
172
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000173- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +0000174 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
175
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +0000176- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
177
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000178- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +0000179 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
180 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
181 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000182
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +0000183- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
184
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +0000185- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
186 returning None.
187
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000188- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +0000189 ('\') with a specific error message.
190
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +0000191- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
192
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +0000193- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
194 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
195
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000196- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000197 an ferror() call.
198
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000199- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
200 list.sort().
201
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000202- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
203 (2+3) --> (5).
204
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000205- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
206
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000207- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
208 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000209
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000210- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
211 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
212 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
213
Neil Schemenauercf52c072005-08-12 17:34:58 +0000214- Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a
215 unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and
216 calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance.
217
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000218Extension Modules
219-----------------
220
Georg Brandlf4f44152006-02-18 22:29:33 +0000221- Patch #1393157: os.startfile() now has an optional argument to specify
222 a "command verb" to invoke on the file.
223
Neal Norwitz082b2df2006-02-07 07:04:46 +0000224- Bug #876637, prevent stack corruption when socket descriptor
225 is larger than FD_SETSIZE.
226
Neal Norwitz0e6bc8c2006-02-05 05:45:43 +0000227- Patch #1407135, bug #1424041: harmonize mmap behavior of anonymous memory.
228 mmap.mmap(-1, size) now returns anonymous memory in both Unix and Windows.
229 mmap.mmap(0, size) should not be used on Windows for anonymous memory.
230
Martin v. Löwis57a34e82006-02-04 19:12:37 +0000231- Patch #1422385: The nis module now supports access to domains other
232 than the system default domain.
233
Martin v. Löwis14694662006-02-03 12:54:16 +0000234- Use Win32 API to implement os.stat/fstat. As a result, subsecond timestamps
235 are reported, the limit on path name lengths is removed, and stat reports
236 WindowsError now (instead of OSError).
237
Gregory P. Smithcfc4a8d2006-01-29 19:46:23 +0000238- Add bsddb.db.DBEnv.set_tx_timestamp allowing time based database recovery.
239
Neal Norwitz62a21122006-01-25 05:21:55 +0000240- Bug #1413192, fix seg fault in bsddb if a transaction was deleted
241 before the env.
242
Martin v. Löwis11017b12006-01-14 18:12:57 +0000243- Patch #1103116: Basic AF_NETLINK support.
244
Neal Norwitz3b4fff82006-01-11 08:54:45 +0000245- Bug #1402308, (possible) segfault when using mmap.mmap(-1, ...)
246
Neal Norwitz88bbd732006-01-10 07:05:44 +0000247- Bug #1400822, _curses over{lay,write} doesn't work when passing 6 ints.
248 Also fix ungetmouse() which did not accept arguments properly.
249 The code now conforms to the documented signature.
250
Neal Norwitz5e3d8622006-01-09 06:24:35 +0000251- Bug #1400115, Fix segfault when calling curses.panel.userptr()
252 without prior setting of the userptr.
253
Neal Norwitz40c6b472006-01-05 05:43:35 +0000254- Fix 64-bit problems in bsddb.
255
Neal Norwitz8856fb72005-12-18 03:34:22 +0000256- Patch #1365916: fix some unsafe 64-bit mmap methods.
257
Hye-Shik Changc5c57e62005-12-12 11:48:32 +0000258- Bug #1290333: Added a workaround for cjkcodecs' _codecs_cn build
259 problem on AIX.
260
Georg Brandla13c2442005-11-22 19:30:31 +0000261- Bug #869197: os.setgroups rejects long integer arguments
262
Neal Norwitz0f46bbf2005-11-03 05:00:25 +0000263- Bug #1346533, select.poll() doesn't raise an error if timeout > sys.maxint
264
Neal Norwitz7b631792005-11-02 05:26:07 +0000265- Bug #1344508, Fix UNIX mmap leaking file descriptors
266
Neal Norwitzf3396542005-10-28 05:52:22 +0000267- Patch #1338314, Bug #1336623: fix tarfile so it can extract
268 REGTYPE directories from tarfiles written by old programs.
269
Gregory P. Smithe101df92006-01-24 20:09:45 +0000270- Patch #1407992, fixes broken bsddb module db associate when using
271 BerkeleyDB 3.3, 4.0 or 4.1.
272
273- Get bsddb module to build with BerkeleyDB version 4.4
274
275- Get bsddb module to build with BerkeleyDB version 3.2
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +0000276
Neal Norwitz484d9a42005-09-30 04:46:49 +0000277- Patch #1309009, Fix segfault in pyexpat when the XML document is in latin_1,
278 but Python incorrectly assumes it is in UTF-8 format
279
Georg Brandle677adc2005-09-29 13:40:49 +0000280- Fix parse errors in the readline module when compiling without threads.
281
Hye-Shik Chang9ceebd52005-09-24 14:58:47 +0000282- Patch #1288833: Removed thread lock from socket.getaddrinfo on
283 FreeBSD 5.3 and later versions which got thread-safe getaddrinfo(3).
284
Michael W. Hudson10402a32005-09-22 09:19:01 +0000285- Patches #1298449 and #1298499: Add some missing checks for error
286 returns in cStringIO.c.
287
Neal Norwitz058bde12005-09-21 06:44:25 +0000288- Patch #1297028: fix segfault if call type on MultibyteCodec,
289 MultibyteStreamReader, or MultibyteStreamWriter
290
Neal Norwitzcfe7dd92005-09-19 06:49:27 +0000291- Fix memory leak in posix.access().
292
Martin v. Löwis8b291e22005-09-18 08:17:56 +0000293- Patch #1213831: Fix typo in unicodedata._getcode.
294
Georg Brandlfb1ef852005-09-14 20:53:32 +0000295- Bug #1007046: os.startfile() did not accept unicode strings encoded in
296 the file system encoding.
297
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000298- Patch #756021: Special-case socket.inet_aton('255.255.255.255') for
299 platforms that don't have inet_aton().
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000300
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000301- Bug #1215928: Fix bz2.BZ2File.seek() for 64-bit file offsets.
302
303- Bug #1191043: Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines for files containing one
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000304 line without newlines.
305
Georg Brandl38387b82005-08-24 07:17:40 +0000306- Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did
307 on Windows.
308
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000309- Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
Martin v. Löwisebd9d5b2005-08-09 15:00:59 +0000310 st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
311
Michael W. Hudson8137bea2005-07-27 20:24:40 +0000312- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
313 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
314 for large or negative values.
315
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000316- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000317 implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false.
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000318
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000319- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
320
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000321- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
322 if available on the platform.
323
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000324- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
325 available on the platform.
326
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000327- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
328 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
329
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000330- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
331
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000332- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
333 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
334 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
335
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000336- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
337
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000338- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
339 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
340
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000341- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000342 file size.
343
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000344- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
345
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000346- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
347 {remove_history,replace_history}
348
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000349- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
350 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000351
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000352- stat_float_times is now True.
353
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000354- array.array objects are now picklable.
355
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000356- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
357 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
358
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000359- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
360 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
361 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
362
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000363- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
364 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000365
366Library
367-------
368
Georg Brandl7b4e7c22006-02-18 21:10:56 +0000369- Patch #1373643: The chunk module can now read chunks larger than
370 two gigabytes.
371
Georg Brandl21dd1af2006-02-17 13:35:13 +0000372- Patch #1417555: SimpleHTTPServer now returns Last-Modified headers.
373
Georg Brandlbd3bc4d2006-02-17 09:52:53 +0000374- Bug #1430298: It is now possible to send a mail with an empty
375 return address using smtplib.
376
Georg Brandl0e1abe22006-02-17 09:48:14 +0000377- Bug #1432260: The names of lambda functions are now properly displayed
378 in pydoc.
Georg Brandl501dd0d2006-02-17 09:45:40 +0000379
Martin v. Löwis00756902006-02-05 17:09:41 +0000380- Patch #1412872: zipfile now sets the creator system to 3 (Unix)
381 unless the system is Win32.
382
Martin v. Löwisc81e3a62006-01-30 15:04:31 +0000383- Patch #1349118: urllib now supports user:pass@ style proxy
Martin v. Löwis3e865952006-01-24 15:51:21 +0000384 specifications, raises IOErrors when proxies for unsupported protocols
385 are defined, and uses the https proxy on https redirections.
386
Georg Brandl531ceba2006-01-21 07:20:56 +0000387- Bug #902075: urllib2 now supports 'host:port' style proxy specifications.
388
389- Bug #1407902: Add support for sftp:// URIs to urlparse.
Georg Brandl89f35ac2006-01-20 17:24:23 +0000390
Georg Brandlb709c2c2006-01-20 09:07:35 +0000391- Bug #1371247: Update Windows locale identifiers in locale.py.
392
Neal Norwitzf60cd472006-01-14 07:05:13 +0000393- Bug #1394565: SimpleHTTPServer now doesn't choke on query parameters
Georg Brandl45ab2332006-01-13 17:05:56 +0000394 any more.
Georg Brandlb709c2c2006-01-20 09:07:35 +0000395
Georg Brandl4edd9892006-01-13 16:59:46 +0000396- Bug #1403410: The warnings module now doesn't get confused
397 when it can't find out the module name it generates a warning for.
Georg Brandlb709c2c2006-01-20 09:07:35 +0000398
Martin v. Löwis412ed3b2006-01-08 10:45:39 +0000399- Patch #1177307: Added a new codec utf_8_sig for UTF-8 with a BOM signature.
400
Neal Norwitzab86f8e2005-12-23 21:44:36 +0000401- Patch #1157027: cookielib mishandles RFC 2109 cookies in Netscape mode
402
Neal Norwitz338e7862005-12-23 21:27:46 +0000403- Patch #1117398: cookielib.LWPCookieJar and .MozillaCookieJar now raise
404 LoadError as documented, instead of IOError. For compatibility,
405 LoadError subclasses IOError.
406
Brett Cannon3cbd0382005-12-16 22:49:23 +0000407- Added the hashlib module. It provides secure hash functions for MD5 and
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000408 SHA1, 224, 256, 384, and 512. Note that recent developments make the
409 historic MD5 and SHA1 unsuitable for cryptographic-strength applications.
410 In <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-December/058850.html>
411 Ronald L. Rivest offered this advice for Python:
412
413 "The consensus of researchers in this area (at least as
414 expressed at the NIST Hash Function Workshop 10/31/05),
415 is that SHA-256 is a good choice for the time being, but
416 that research should continue, and other alternatives may
417 arise from this research. The larger SHA's also seem OK."
Brett Cannon3cbd0382005-12-16 22:49:23 +0000418
Fredrik Lundh7e0aef02005-12-12 18:54:55 +0000419- Added a subset of Fredrik Lundh's ElementTree package. Available
420 modules are xml.etree.ElementTree, xml.etree.ElementPath, and
421 xml.etree.ElementInclude, from ElementTree 1.2.6.
422
Martin v. Löwis307021f2005-11-27 16:59:04 +0000423- Patch #1162825: Support non-ASCII characters in IDLE window titles.
424
Georg Brandl1f663572005-11-26 16:50:44 +0000425- Bug #1365984: urllib now opens "data:" URLs again.
426
Brett Cannonad07ff22005-11-23 02:15:50 +0000427- Patch #1314396: prevent deadlock for threading.Thread.join() when an exception
428 is raised within the method itself on a previous call (e.g., passing in an
429 illegal argument)
430
Brett Cannon5d0bf942005-11-02 23:04:26 +0000431- Bug #1340337: change time.strptime() to always return ValueError when there
432 is an error in the format string.
433
Georg Brandle8f24432005-10-03 14:16:44 +0000434- Patch #754022: Greatly enhanced webbrowser.py (by Oleg Broytmann).
435
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000436- Bug #729103: pydoc.py: Fix docother() method to accept additional
Georg Brandl8b813db2005-10-01 16:32:31 +0000437 "parent" argument.
438
Georg Brandlaa935172005-09-29 20:49:16 +0000439- Patch #1300515: xdrlib.py: Fix pack_fstring() to really use null bytes
440 for padding.
441
Georg Brandl80ba8e82005-09-29 20:16:07 +0000442- Bug #1296004: httplib.py: Limit maximal amount of data read from the
443 socket to avoid a MemoryError on Windows.
444
Matthias Klosef3f231f2005-09-20 07:02:49 +0000445- Patch #1166948: locale.py: Prefer LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE and LANG over LANGUAGE
446 to get the correct encoding.
447
448- Patch #1166938: locale.py: Parse LANGUAGE as a colon separated list of
449 languages.
450
Martin v. Löwis4ed67382005-09-18 08:34:39 +0000451- Patch #1268314: Cache lines in StreamReader.readlines for performance.
452
Brett Cannona783d062005-09-15 02:34:56 +0000453- Bug #1290505: Fix clearing the regex cache for time.strptime().
454
Martin v. Löwis5dbdc592005-08-27 10:07:56 +0000455- Bug #1167128: Fix size of a symlink in a tarfile to be 0.
456
Georg Brandl5a650a22005-08-26 08:51:34 +0000457- Patch #810023: Fix off-by-one bug in urllib.urlretrieve reporthook
458 functionality.
459
Martin v. Löwis8b595142005-08-25 11:03:38 +0000460- Bug #1163178: Make IDNA return an empty string when the input is empty.
461
Georg Brandl532efab2005-08-24 22:34:21 +0000462- Patch #848017: Make Cookie more RFC-compliant. Use CRLF as default output
463 separator and do not output trailing semicola.
464
Georg Brandlb9256022005-08-24 18:46:39 +0000465- Patch #1062060: urllib.urlretrieve() now raises a new exception, named
466 ContentTooShortException, when the actually downloaded size does not
467 match the Content-Length header.
468
Martin v. Löwis0a5d4a22005-08-24 14:55:22 +0000469- Bug #1121494: distutils.dir_utils.mkpath now accepts Unicode strings.
470
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000471- Bug #1178484: Return complete lines from codec stream readers
472 even if there is an exception in later lines, resulting in
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000473 correct line numbers for decoding errors in source code.
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000474
Georg Brandl6d2b3462005-08-24 07:36:17 +0000475- Bug #1192315: Disallow negative arguments to clear() in pdb.
476
Martin v. Löwisb813c532005-08-07 20:51:04 +0000477- Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
478
Georg Brandl649f8e72005-08-03 07:30:12 +0000479- Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
480 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
481
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000482- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
483 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
484 Tkdnd.
485
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000486- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
487 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
488
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000489- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
490 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
491
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000492- textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000493 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
494
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000495- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
496 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
497
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000498- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
499 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
500
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000501- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000502 it can be missing in embedded interpreters
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000503
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000504- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
505
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000506- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
507 error messages.
508
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000509- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
510
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000511- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
512 Bug #1224621.
513
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000514- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
515 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
516 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
517 terminates by raising StopIteration.
518
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000519- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
520
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000521- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
522 component of the path.
523
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000524- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
525 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
526 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
527 class at all.
528
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000529- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
530 files to PyPI.
531
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000532- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
533 them to PyPI.
534
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000535- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
536 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
537 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
538 work as expected.
539
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000540- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
541 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
542
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000543- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000544 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
545
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000546- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
547
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000548- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
549 to build.
550
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000551- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
552 symbolic links on Windows.
553
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000554- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000555 profile.py if available.
556
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000557- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
558
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000559- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
560 in LWPCookieJar.
561
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000562- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
563
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000564- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
565
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000566- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
567
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000568- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
569
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000570- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
571
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000572- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
573
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000574- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
575
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000576- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
577
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000578- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
579 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
580 be exploited in various ways.
581
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000582- Bug #1222790: in SimpleXMLRPCServer, set the reuse-address and close-on-exec
Andrew M. Kuchling3a976052005-12-04 15:07:41 +0000583 flags on the HTTP listening socket.
584
Andrew M. Kuchlinge63fde72005-12-04 15:36:57 +0000585- Bug #792570: SimpleXMLRPCServer had problems if the request grew too large.
586 Fixed by reading the HTTP body in chunks instead of one big socket.read().
587
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000588- Patches #893642, #1039083: add allow_none, encoding arguments to constructors of
Andrew M. Kuchling10a16de2005-12-04 16:34:40 +0000589 SimpleXMLRPCServer and CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler.
590
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000591- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
592
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000593- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
594
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000595- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
596
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000597- Enhancements to the csv module:
598
599 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000600 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000601 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000602 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
603 reporting.
604 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
605 dictates.
606 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000607 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000608 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000609 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
610 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000611 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
612 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000613 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000614 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
615 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
616 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
617 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
618 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
619 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
620 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
621 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
622 without first creating a dialect class.
623 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
624 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
625 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000626 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000627 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
628 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000629 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
630 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
631 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
632 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000633 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
634 This has been fixed.
635
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000636- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
637 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
638 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
639 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
640
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000641- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
642
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000643- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
644 (Bug #951915).
645
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000646- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
647 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
648 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000649 encoding alias table.
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000650
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000651- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
652
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000653- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
654 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
655
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000656- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
657
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000658- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
659
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000660- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
661
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000662- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
663
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000664- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
665
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000666- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
667 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
668 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
669
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000670- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000671 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000672
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000673- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
674 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
675 tokenizer with very long source lines.
676
Barry Warsaw538561e2006-01-01 21:48:54 +0000677- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called
678 immediately after creating the object, without any intervening
679 ``.decompress()`` calls.
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000680
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000681- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
682 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000683
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000684- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
685 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
686
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000687- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
688 correctly.
689
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000690- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
691 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
692 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
693 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
694 between two lines.
695
Walter Dörwalda47d1c02005-08-30 10:23:14 +0000696- Bug #1251300: On UCS-4 builds the "unicode-internal" codec will now complain
697 about illegal code points. The codec now supports PEP 293 style error
698 handlers.
699
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000700- Bug #1235646: ``codecs.StreamRecoder.next()`` now reencodes the data it reads
Walter Dörwaldc5238b82005-09-01 11:56:53 +0000701 from the input stream, so that the output is a byte string in the correct
702 encoding instead of a unicode string.
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000703
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000704- Bug #1202493: Fixing SRE parser to handle '{}' as perl does, rather than
705 considering it exactly like a '*'.
706
Walter Dörwald007f8df2005-10-09 19:42:27 +0000707- Bug #1245379: Add "unicode-1-1-utf-7" as an alias for "utf-7" to
708 ``encodings.aliases``.
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000709
Walter Dörwald09f0dd52005-11-21 19:10:07 +0000710- ` uu.encode()`` and ``uu.decode()`` now support unicode filenames.
711
Gustavo Niemeyer548148812006-01-31 18:34:13 +0000712- Patch #1413711: Certain patterns of differences were making difflib
713 touch the recursion limit.
714
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000715Build
716-----
717
Martin v. Löwis86d66262006-02-17 08:40:11 +0000718- Patch #1432345: Make python compile on DragonFly.
719
Martin v. Löwis856bf9a2006-02-14 20:42:55 +0000720- Build support for Win64-AMD64 was added.
721
Martin v. Löwisa55e55e2006-02-11 15:55:14 +0000722- Patch #1428494: Prefer linking against ncursesw over ncurses library.
723
Martin v. Löwisfd9a72a2006-01-08 10:07:33 +0000724- Patch #881820: look for openpty and forkpty also in libbsd.
725
Martin v. Löwis64c33dd2006-01-03 07:42:14 +0000726- The sources of zlib are now part of the Python distribution (zlib 1.2.3).
727 The zlib module is now builtin on Windows.
728
Martin v. Löwisd5845ec2005-12-30 12:31:38 +0000729- Use -xcode=pic32 for CCSHARED on Solaris with SunPro.
730
Martin v. Löwis147fbe52005-08-07 21:09:30 +0000731- Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
732 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
733
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000734- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
735 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
736
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000737- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
738 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
739 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000740 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000741
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000742- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
743 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
744 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
745
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000746- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
747
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000748- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
749 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
750
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000751- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
752 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
753 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
754 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
755 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
756 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
757 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
758 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
759
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000760- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
761 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
762 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
763 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
764
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000765C API
766-----
767
Raymond Hettingerbeb31012005-08-16 03:47:52 +0000768- Added a C API for set and frozenset objects.
769
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000770- Removed PyRange_New().
771
Walter Dörwaldd1c1e102005-10-06 20:29:57 +0000772- Patch #1313939: PyUnicode_DecodeCharmap() accepts a unicode string as the
773 mapping argument now. This string is used as a mapping table. Byte values
774 greater than the length of the string and 0xFFFE are treated as undefined
775 mappings.
776
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000777
778Tests
779-----
780
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000781- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000782
Hye-Shik Changaaa2f1d2005-12-10 17:44:27 +0000783- Patch #1276356: New resource "urlfetch" is implemented. This enables
784 even impatient people to run tests that require remote files.
785
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000786
787Documentation
788-------------
789
Georg Brandl8cb30772006-01-20 09:34:29 +0000790- Bug #1402224: Add warning to dl docs about crashes.
791
Georg Brandla3a93ae2006-01-20 09:14:36 +0000792- Bug #1396471: Document that Windows' ftell() can return invalid
793 values for text files with UNIX-style line endings.
794
Georg Brandl32252422005-09-14 20:42:00 +0000795- Bug #1274828: Document os.path.splitunc().
796
Georg Brandl79c122f2005-08-24 07:31:33 +0000797- Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py.
798
Georg Brandl6f2bbd32005-08-24 07:26:55 +0000799- Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation.
800
Georg Brandlf13c4ba2005-08-02 10:28:08 +0000801- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
802
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000803- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
804
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000805- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
806
807- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
808
809- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
810
811- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
812
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000813- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
814 Closes bug #1166582.
815
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000816- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
817 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
818 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
819
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000820Mac
821---
822
823
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000824New platforms
825-------------
826
827- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
828
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000829
830Tools/Demos
831-----------
832
Georg Brandl56897312005-08-24 18:32:30 +0000833- Added two new files to Tools/scripts: pysource.py, which recursively
834 finds Python source files, and findnocoding.py, which finds Python
835 source files that need an encoding declaration.
836 Patch #784089, credits to Oleg Broytmann.
837
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000838- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
839
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000840- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000841
Barry Warsaw538561e2006-01-01 21:48:54 +0000842- Fixed a display glitch in Pynche, which could cause the right arrow to
843 wiggle over by a pixel.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000844
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000845What's New in Python 2.4 final?
846===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000847
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000848*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000849
850Core and builtins
851-----------------
852
853- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
854 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
855 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
856
857
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000858What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
859==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000860
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000861*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000862
863Core and builtins
864-----------------
865
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000866- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
867 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
868 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
869
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000870
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000871Library
872-------
873
874- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
875 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
876 raised is re-raised.
877
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000878- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
879 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
880
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000881- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
882 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
883 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
884 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
885 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
886 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
887 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
888 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
889 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
890 by the slice are recomputed now.
891
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000892- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000893
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000894Build
895-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000896
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000897- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
898 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
899 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000900
901C API
902-----
903
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000904- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
905
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000906
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000907What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
908================================
909
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000910*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000911
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000912License
913-------
914
915The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
916is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
917changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
918Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
919intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
920durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
921the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
922License::
923
924 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
925
926says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
927to Python 2.1.1.
928
929The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
930License Version 2.
931
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000932Core and builtins
933-----------------
934
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000935- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
936 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
937 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
938 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
939 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
940 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
941 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
Andrew M. Kuchlingb2a739d2005-11-22 15:14:44 +0000942 ``AttributeError`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000943 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
944 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
945
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000946- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000947
948Extension Modules
949-----------------
950
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000951- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
952 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
953 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
954 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000955
956Library
957-------
958
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000959- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
960 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
961 returned.
962
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000963- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
964
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000965- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
966 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
967
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000968- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
969
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000970- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
971 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000972
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000973- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
974
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000975- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
976
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000977- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000978 the source code is updated and reloaded.
979
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000980Build
981-----
982
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000983- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000984
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000985What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
986================================
987
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000988*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000989
990Core and builtins
991-----------------
992
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000993- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000994 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
995
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000996- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
997 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
998 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
999 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
1000
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +00001001- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
1002 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
1003
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +00001004- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
1005 constant.
1006
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +00001007- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
1008 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
1009 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
1010 large), and to anomalies such as
1011 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
1012 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
1013 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
1014 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001015
1016Extension modules
1017-----------------
1018
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +00001019- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
1020 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +00001021 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
1022 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
1023 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001024
1025Library
1026-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +00001027
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +00001028- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +00001029 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +00001030 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
1031 --swig-cpp.
1032
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +00001033- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
1034 it is set.
1035
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +00001036- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +00001037
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +00001038- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
1039 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
1040 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
1041 Closes bug #1039270.
1042
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +00001043- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +00001044
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +00001045 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +00001046 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
1047 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
1048 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
1049 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
1050 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
1051 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
1052 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
1053 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
1054 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
1055 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
1056 + Updates to documentation.
1057
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +00001058- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
1059 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
1060 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
1061 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
1062
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +00001063- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001064
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +00001065- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
1066 applications should use the getmember function.
1067
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +00001068- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
1069
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +00001070- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
1071 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
1072 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
1073 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
1074 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
1075 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
1076 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
1077 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
1078 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
1079
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001080- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
1081 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +00001082 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001083
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +00001084- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
1085 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
1086 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
1087 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
1088 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
1089 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
1090 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
1091 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001092
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +00001093- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
1094 the new public features (of which there are many).
1095
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +00001096- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001097 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
1098 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
1099 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
1100 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +00001101 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001102
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +00001103- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
1104
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +00001105- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
1106 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
1107 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
1108 options.
1109
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +00001110- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
1111 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
1112 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
1113 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
1114 conditions under which non-string values work.
1115
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001116Build
1117-----
1118
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +00001119- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
1120 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
1121 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
1122
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +00001123- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
1124 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
1125 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
1126 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
1127 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001128
1129C API
1130-----
1131
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +00001132- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
1133 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
1134
1135- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
1136
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +00001137- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
1138 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
1139 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
1140 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
1141 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
1142 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
1143 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
1144 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
1145 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
1146
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +00001147- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
1148
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +00001149- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
1150 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
1151 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001152
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001153Tests
1154-----
1155
1156- test__locale ported to unittest
1157
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001158Mac
1159---
1160
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +00001161- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
1162 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
1163 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001164
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001165Tools/Demos
1166-----------
1167
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +00001168- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
1169 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
1170 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
1171 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
1172 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001173
1174
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001175What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
1176=================================
1177
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +00001178*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001179
1180Core and builtins
1181-----------------
1182
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001183- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001184 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
1185
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001186- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
1187 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
1188 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
1189 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
1190 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
1191 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
1192 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
1193 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001194 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
1195 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
1196 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
1197 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
1198 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001199
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +00001200- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
1201 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
1202 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
1203 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
1204 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
1205
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +00001206- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
1207
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +00001208- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
1209 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
1210
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +00001211- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
1212 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
1213 modified the list.
1214
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +00001215- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
1216 functions is now writable.
1217
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +00001218- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
1219 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
1220 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
1221 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
1222
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001223- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
1224 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
1225 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
1226 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
1227 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +00001228
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +00001229- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
1230 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
1231
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001232Extension modules
1233-----------------
1234
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001235- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
1236
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +00001237- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
1238 data.
1239
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001240- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
1241 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
1242 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
1243 supposed to have been truncated away.
1244
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +00001245- Added socket.socketpair().
1246
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +00001247- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
1248 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
1249
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001250- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +00001251 versions of Python, have now been removed.
1252
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001253Library
1254-------
1255
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001256- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001257 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001258
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +00001259- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
1260 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
1261
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +00001262- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
1263 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
1264
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001265- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
1266
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +00001267- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
1268 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +00001269
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +00001270- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
1271 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
1272
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +00001273- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
1274
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +00001275- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
1276
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +00001277- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
1278
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +00001279- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
1280 Percivall.
1281
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +00001282- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
1283 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
1284
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001285- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
1286 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
1287 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001288 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001289
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001290- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
1291 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
1292 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
1293 and exponent.
1294
1295- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
1296
1297- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +00001298 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001299 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
1300
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001301- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
1302 to the readline module.
1303
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001304- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001305 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
1306 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001307
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +00001308- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
1309 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
1310 contains symlinks.
1311
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +00001312- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
1313 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
1314
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +00001315- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
1316 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
1317 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1318
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001319- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
1320 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
1321 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
1322 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
1323 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
1324 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
1325 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
1326 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
1327 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
1328 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
1329 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
1330 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
1331 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
1332
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +00001333- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
1334
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001335Tools/Demos
1336-----------
1337
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001338- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
1339 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
1340
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +00001341- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
1342
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001343Build
1344-----
1345
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001346- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
1347 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
1348 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
1349 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
1350 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
1351 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
1352 plans to do so.
1353
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +00001354- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
1355 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
1356
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +00001357- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
1358 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
1359
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001360- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
1361 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
1362
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +00001363- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
1364 GNU/k*BSD systems.
1365
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +00001366- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
1367 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
1368
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001369C API
1370-----
1371
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001372..
1373
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001374Documentation
1375-------------
1376
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001377- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1378 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1379
1380- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1381 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1382 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001383
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001384New platforms
1385-------------
1386
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001387- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1388
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001389Tests
1390-----
1391
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001392..
1393
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001394Windows
1395-------
1396
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001397- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1398 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1399 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1400 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1401 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1402 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1403 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1404 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1405 the problem.
1406
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001407Mac
1408---
1409
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001410..
1411
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001412
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001413What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1414=================================
1415
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001416*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001417
1418Core and builtins
1419-----------------
1420
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001421- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1422 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1423 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1424 sensitive code.
1425
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001426- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001427 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001428
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001429 @staticmethod
1430 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001431
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001432 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001433
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001434- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1435 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1436 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1437 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1438 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1439 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1440 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1441 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1442 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1443 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1444 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1445
1446 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1447 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1448 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1449 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1450 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1451 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1452 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1453
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001454- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1455 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1456
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001457- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001458 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001459
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001460- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001461 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001462 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1463
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001464- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001465 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1466 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1467
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001468- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1469 types that support garbage collection.
1470
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001471- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1472
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001473- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1474 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1475 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1476 Jython.
1477
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001478- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1479
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001480- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1481 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1482
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001483- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1484 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1485 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001486
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001487- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1488 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1489 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1490
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001491Extension modules
1492-----------------
1493
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001494- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1495
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001496Library
1497-------
1498
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001499- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1500 TIS-620
1501
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001502- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1503 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1504 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1505 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1506 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1507 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1508 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1509 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1510 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1511 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1512
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001513- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1514
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001515- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1516 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1517 same as when the argument is omitted).
1518 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1519
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001520- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1521
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001522- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1523 schemes are offered.
1524
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001525- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1526
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001527- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1528 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1529 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1530
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001531- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1532
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001533- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1534 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1535
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001536- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1537 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1538 when dummy_threading is being used.
1539
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001540- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1541 from a tarfile.
1542
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001543- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001544 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001545
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001546- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1547 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1548 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1549 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1550
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001551- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1552 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1553
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001554- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1555 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1556 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1557 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1558 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1559 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1560 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1561 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1562 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1563 by some other method in progress).
1564
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001565- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1566 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1567 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001568
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001569- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1570
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001571- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1572 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1573 AM Kuchling.
1574
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001575- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1576 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1577 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1578
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001579- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1580 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1581 instead of unsigned.
1582
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001583- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001584 no longer part of the public API.
1585
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001586- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1587 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1588 string methods of the same name).
1589
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001590- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001591 SF patch 945642.
1592
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001593- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1594
1595 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1596
1597 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1598 DocTestSuites.
1599
1600- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1601 that provide thread-local data.
1602
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001603- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1604 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1605
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001606- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1607
1608- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1609 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1610 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1611
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001612- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1613
1614 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1615 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1616 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001617
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001618 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1619 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1620 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1621 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1622
1623 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1624 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1625
1626 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1627 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1628 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1629 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1630
1631 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1632 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1633 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1634 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1635 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1636
1637 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1638 wrapping help output.
1639
1640 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1641 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1642 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001643
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001644C API
1645-----
1646
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001647- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1648 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1649 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1650 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1651 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1652 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1653 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1654 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1655 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1656 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1657 its visible semantics have not changed.
1658
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001659- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1660 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1661
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001662Documentation
1663-------------
1664
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001665- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001666
1667 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001668 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001669
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001670 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001671
1672 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1673
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001674- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001675
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001676Tests
1677-----
1678
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001679- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001680 platforms that use the Makefile.
1681
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001682- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1683 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1684 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1685
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001686
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001687What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1688=================================
1689
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001690*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001691
1692Core and builtins
1693-----------------
1694
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001695- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1696 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1697 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1698 objects now (one object instead of three).
1699
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001700- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1701 Windows DLLs.
1702
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001703- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1704 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001705
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001706- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1707 a new .pyc magic.
1708
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001709- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1710 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1711 be there.
1712
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001713- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1714 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1715 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1716
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001717- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1718 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1719 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1720
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001721- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1722
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001723- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1724 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1725 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001726
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001727- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1728 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1729
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001730- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1731
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001732- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001733 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001734
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001735- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1736
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001737- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1738
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001739- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1740 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1741
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001742- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1743 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1744 Fixes bug #858016 .
1745
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001746- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1747 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1748 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1749
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001750- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1751 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1752 improves their performance (about 35%).
1753
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001754- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1755 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1756 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1757
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001758- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1759 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1760 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1761 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1762
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001763- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1764 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001765 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001766 length is not known).
1767
1768- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1769 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001770 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1771 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001772 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1773
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001774- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1775 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1776
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001777- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1778 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1779 keyword arguments.
1780
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001781- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1782 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1783 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1784
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001785- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1786 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1787 cases.
1788
1789- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1790 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1791 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1792 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1793 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1794 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1795 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1796 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1797 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1798 a release build.
1799
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001800- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1801 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1802
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001803- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001804 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001805
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001806- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1807 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1808 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1809 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1810 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1811 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1812 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1813 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1814 destroyed.
1815
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001816- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1817 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1818 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1819 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1820 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1821 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1822 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1823 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1824
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001825- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1826 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1827 character other than a space.
1828
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001829- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1830 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1831 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1832 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1833 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1834 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1835 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1836 attributes with the same name.
1837
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001838- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1839 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1840 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1841 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1842 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1843 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1844 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1845 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1846 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1847 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1848 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1849 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1850 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1851 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001852
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001853- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1854 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1855 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1856 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1857 This has been repaired.
1858
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001859- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1860
1861- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1862
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001863- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1864 over a sequence.
1865
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001866- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001867 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001868
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001869- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1870
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001871- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1872 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1873 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1874 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1875 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1876 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1877 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1878 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1879
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001880- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1881 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1882 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1883
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001884- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1885 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1886 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1887 freelist.
1888
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001889- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1890 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1891
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001892- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1893 number.
1894
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001895- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1896 a TypeError exception.
1897
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001898- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1899 820195.
1900
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001901- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1902 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1903 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1904
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001905- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001906 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1907 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001908
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001909- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1910 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1911 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1912
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001913- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1914 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001915 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001916
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001917- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001918 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1919 the first call.
1920
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001921
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001922Extension modules
1923-----------------
1924
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001925- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1926 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1927
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001928- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1929 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1930 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1931 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1932 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1933 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1934 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001935
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001936- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1937
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001938- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1939
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001940- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1941 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1942
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001943- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1944 fewer false positives.
1945
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001946- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1947 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1948
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001949- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001950 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1951
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001952- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001953 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001954 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001955 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1956 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001957
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001958- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1959 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1960 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1961 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1962
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001963- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1964 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1965 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1966 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1967 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1968 #897625.
1969
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001970- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1971 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1972
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001973- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1974 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1975 and pops on either side of the deque.
1976
1977- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1978 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1979
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001980- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1981 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1982 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1983 other functions that expect a function argument.
1984
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001985- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1986
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001987- os.getsid was added.
1988
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001989- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1990 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1991 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1992
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001993- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1994
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001995- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1996
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001997- readline.clear_history was added.
1998
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001999- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
2000
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00002001- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
2002
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00002003- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
2004
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00002005- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
2006
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00002007- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
2008
2009- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
2010
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00002011- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
2012
2013- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
2014
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00002015- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
2016 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
2017 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
2018
2019- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
2020 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
2021 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
2022 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
2023 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
2024 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
2025 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
2026
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00002027- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
2028 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
2029 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
2030 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00002031
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002032- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00002033 iterators from a single iterable.
2034
2035- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
2036 of raising a TypeError exception.
2037
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00002038- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
2039 as parameter.
2040
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002041Library
2042-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00002043
Armin Rigoa871ef22006-02-08 12:53:56 +00002044- Added a new module: cProfile, a C profiler with the same interface as the
2045 profile module. cProfile avoids some of the drawbacks of the hotshot
2046 profiler and provides a bit more information than the other two profilers.
2047 Based on "lsprof" (patch #1212837).
2048
Georg Brandlf0de6a12005-08-22 18:02:59 +00002049- Bug #1266283: The new function "lexists" is now in os.path.__all__.
2050
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00002051- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
2052 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
2053 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002054
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00002055- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
2056 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
2057 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00002058
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00002059- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00002060
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00002061- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
2062 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00002063
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00002064- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
2065 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
2066
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00002067- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
2068
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00002069- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00002070 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00002071
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002072- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00002073 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002074
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00002075- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
2076
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00002077- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
2078 on cygwin and mingw32.
2079
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00002080- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
2081
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00002082- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
2083 module.
2084
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00002085- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
2086 installation scheme for all platforms.
2087
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00002088- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00002089 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00002090
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00002091- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
2092 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
2093 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
2094
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00002095- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
2096 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
2097 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
2098
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00002099- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
2100
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00002101- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
2102
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00002103- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
2104 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
2105
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00002106- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
2107 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
2108 type pattern with the same value exists.
2109
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00002110- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
2111 when run from the command prompt).
2112
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00002113- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
2114 not taken into consideration when caching value.
2115
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00002116- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
2117 default sort).
2118
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00002119- Added global runctx function to profile module
2120
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00002121- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
2122
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00002123- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
2124
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00002125- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
2126
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002127- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00002128 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
2129 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
2130 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
2131 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
2132 accordingly.
2133
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00002134- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
2135 decoding standards.
2136
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00002137- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
2138 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
2139 called for all requests.
2140
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00002141- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
2142 they are passed to the compiler.
2143
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00002144- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
2145 indent, width and depth.
2146
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00002147- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
2148 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
2149
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00002150- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
2151 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
2152
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00002153- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
2154
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00002155- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
2156
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00002157- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
2158
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00002159- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
2160 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
2161
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00002162- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00002163 for better performance.
2164
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002165- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00002166
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00002167- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
2168 a string).
2169
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00002170- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
2171
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00002172- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
2173
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00002174- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
2175
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00002176- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
2177
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00002178- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
2179 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
2180 list of fieldnames.
2181
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00002182- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
2183 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
2184
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00002185- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
2186
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00002187- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
2188 empty lists.
2189
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00002190- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
2191 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
2192 and shelves.
2193
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00002194- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
2195 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
2196
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002197- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00002198 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
2199 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002200
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00002201- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
2202 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00002203 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00002204
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002205- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00002206 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
2207 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
2208
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002209- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
2210 and removed in Py2.4.
2211
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00002212- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
2213
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00002214- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
2215
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002216Tools/Demos
2217-----------
2218
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00002219- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
2220 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
2221
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00002222- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
2223
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00002224- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
2225 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
2226 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
2227 destination in situations where both files are given.
2228
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00002229- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
2230 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
2231 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
2232 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
2233
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00002234- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
2235
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00002236- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
2237 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
2238 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
2239 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
2240 now.
2241
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002242- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
2243 in effect
2244
2245- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
2246 C-c C-h
2247
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00002248- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
2249 -d option was given.
2250
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002251Build
2252-----
2253
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00002254- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
2255 build under OS X.
2256
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00002257- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
2258 --enable-profiling.
2259
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00002260- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
2261 is configured --with-tsc.
2262
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00002263- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
2264 on AMD64.
2265
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00002266- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
2267 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
2268
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00002269- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
2270 removed.
2271
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00002272- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
2273 supported (see PEP 11).
2274
2275- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
2276
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00002277- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
2278
2279- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
2280 (see PEP 11).
2281
2282- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
2283 sizeof(char) must be 1.
2284
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002285C API
2286-----
2287
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00002288- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
2289 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
2290 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
2291
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00002292- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
2293 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
2294 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
2295 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
2296
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00002297- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
2298 generator objects.
2299
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002300- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
2301 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00002302 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
2303 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002304
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00002305- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
2306 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
2307
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00002308- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
2309 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
2310 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
2311 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
2312 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
2313
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00002314- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
2315 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
2316 about 10% faster.
2317
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00002318- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
2319 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
2320
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00002321- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
2322 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
2323 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
2324 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
2325
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002326Windows
2327-------
2328
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00002329- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
2330 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
2331 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
2332 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
2333
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00002334- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
2335 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
2336 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
2337
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002338
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002339What's New in Python 2.3 final?
2340===============================
2341
2342*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
2343
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002344IDLE
2345----
2346
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00002347- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
2348 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
2349 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
2350 context-menu actions.
2351
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002352- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
2353 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
2354 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
2355 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
2356 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
2357 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
2358 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
2359 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
2360 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
2361
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002362
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002363What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
2364=============================================
2365
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00002366*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002367
2368Core and builtins
2369-----------------
2370
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002371- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002372 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002373 comment at the end are still unsupported.
2374
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002375Extension modules
2376-----------------
2377
2378- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
2379 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
2380 than once. This has been fixed.
2381
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002382- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2383 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2384 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2385 call.
2386
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002387- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2388
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002389Library
2390-------
2391
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002392- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2393 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2394
2395- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2396 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2397 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2398 restored.
2399
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002400IDLE
2401----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002402
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002403- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002404
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002405Build
2406-----
2407
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002408- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2409 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2410
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002411C API
2412-----
2413
2414Windows
2415-------
2416
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002417- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2418 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2419
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002420- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2421
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002422Mac
2423---
2424
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002425- Various fixes to pimp.
2426
2427- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2428
2429- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2430 more problems than it solves.
2431
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002432
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002433What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2434=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002435
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002436*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2437
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002438Core and builtins
2439-----------------
2440
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002441- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2442 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2443
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002444- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2445 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002446 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002447
2448- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2449 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2450 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002451 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002452
2453- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2454 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002455
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002456- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2457 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2458 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2459
2460- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002461 770247.
2462
2463- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002464
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002465Extension modules
2466-----------------
2467
2468- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2469 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2470
2471- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2472
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002473- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2474
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002475- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2476 contained within the _strptime module.
2477
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002478- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2479 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2480
2481- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002482 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2483
2484- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2485 the find_class attribute, if present.
2486
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002487- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002488
2489 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2490 (SF bug 763298).
2491
2492 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002493 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2494 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2495 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002496
2497 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2498
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002499Library
2500-------
2501
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002502- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2503
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002504- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2505 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2506 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2507 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2508 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2509 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2510 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2511 or Tester().
2512
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002513- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2514 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2515 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2516 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2517 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2518 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2519 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2520 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2521 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002522
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002523 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002524
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002525- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2526 weren't before was an oversight.
2527
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002528- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2529 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2530
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002531- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2532 when there are no lines.
2533
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002534- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2535 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2536
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002537- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2538 to child processes.
2539
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002540- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2541
2542- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2543
2544- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2545 xmlrpclib.
2546
2547- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2548 responses.
2549
2550- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2551 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2552
2553- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2554 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2555 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2556
2557- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2558 used as patterns.
2559
2560- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2561 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2562 than Tk 8.3.
2563
2564- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2565
2566- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002567
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002568Tools/Demos
2569-----------
2570
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002571- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2572
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002573- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2574
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002575- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002576
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002577Build
2578-----
2579
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002580- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2581
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002582- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2583
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002584- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2585 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002586
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002587- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2588 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2589 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002590
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002591C API
2592-----
2593
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002594- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2595 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2596
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002597Windows
2598-------
2599
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002600- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2601 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2602 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2603 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2604 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2605 Python exception ::
2606
2607 thread.error: can't start new thread
2608
2609 is raised now.
2610
2611- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2612 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2613 instead of from DLL teardown.
2614
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002615Mac
2616---
2617
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002618- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002619 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002620 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2621 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2622 the executable in the bundle.
2623
2624- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002625
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002626- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2627
2628- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2629 on Panther.
2630
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002631What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2632================================
2633
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002634*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002635
2636Core and builtins
2637-----------------
2638
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002639- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2640 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2641 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2642 with the -i option.
2643
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002644- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2645 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2646
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002647- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2648 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2649
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002650- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2651 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2652 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2653 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2654 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2655 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2656 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2657 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2658 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2659 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2660 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2661 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2662 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002663
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002664- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2665 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2666 embedded in a lambda expression.
2667
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002668- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2669 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2670 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2671 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2672 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2673
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002674- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2675 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2676 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2677
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002678- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2679 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2680
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002681- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2682 It's writable again.
2683
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002684- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2685 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2686 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002687 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002688
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002689- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2690 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2691 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2692
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002693Extension modules
2694-----------------
2695
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002696- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2697 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2698
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002699- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2700 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2701 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2702 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2703
2704- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2705 collection.
2706
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002707- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2708 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2709 unique within a single program run.
2710
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002711- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2712 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2713
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002714- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2715 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2716
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002717- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2718 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002719
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002720- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2721
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002722- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2723 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2724
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002725- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2726 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2727 for many BSD-derived systems.
2728
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002729
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002730Library
2731-------
2732
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002733- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2734 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2735 primary ones:
2736
2737 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2738 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2739 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2740
2741 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2742 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2743 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2744 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2745 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2746 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2747
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002748- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2749 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2750 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2751 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2752 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2753 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2754 argument.
2755
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002756- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2757 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2758 in the archive.
2759
2760- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2761 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2762
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002763- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2764 569574).
2765
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002766- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2767 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2768 no more.
2769
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002770- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2771 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2772 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2773 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2774 code coverage.
2775
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002776- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2777 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2778 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002779 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2780 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002781
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002782- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2783 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2784 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002785 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002786
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002787- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2788
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002789- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2790 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2791 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2792 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2793
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002794- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2795 handling.
2796
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002797- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2798 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2799
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002800- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2801 in socket.py.
2802
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002803- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2804
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002805- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2806 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2807 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2808 opener with proxy support.
2809
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002810- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2811
2812- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2813
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002814Tools/Demos
2815-----------
2816
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002817- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2818
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002819- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2820
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002821- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2822 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002823
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002824- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2825 files.
2826
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002827Build
2828-----
2829
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002830- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002831 different root directory.
2832
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002833C API
2834-----
2835
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002836- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2837 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2838 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2839 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2840 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2841 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2842 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2843 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2844 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2845 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2846
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002847- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2848 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2849 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2850 from Python.
2851
2852
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002853New platforms
2854-------------
2855
2856None this time.
2857
2858Tests
2859-----
2860
2861- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2862 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2863
2864Windows
2865-------
2866
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002867- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2868
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002869- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2870 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2871 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2872 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2873 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2874 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2875 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2876 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2877 that's what it's for.
2878
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002879Mac
2880---
2881
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002882- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2883 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2884 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2885 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002886- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2887 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2888- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002889
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002890SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2891------------------------------------
2892
2893430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2894598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2895622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2896661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2897683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2898697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2899713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2900724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2901727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2902729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2903730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2904731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2905732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2906733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2907735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2908740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2909744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2910745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2911747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2912749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2913751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2914753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2915755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2916757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2917760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2918
2919
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002920What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2921================================
2922
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002923*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002924
2925Core and builtins
2926-----------------
2927
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002928- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2929 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2930
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002931- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2932 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2933 and cannot be strings).
2934
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002935- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2936 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2937 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2938 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2939
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002940- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2941 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2942 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2943 Python itself.
2944
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002945- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2946 the referenced object, if it has one.
2947
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002948- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2949 the thread started at
2950 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2951
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002952- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2953 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2954 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2955 placed on a list index.
2956
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002957- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2958 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2959 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2960 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2961
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002962- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2963 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2964 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2965 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2966 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2967 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2968 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2969
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002970- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2971 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2972 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2973 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2974 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2975
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002976- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2977 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002978
2979- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2980 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2981 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2982 #693195.)
2983
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002984- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2985 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002986
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002987- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002988 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002989 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2990 interpreter executions, would fail.
2991
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002992- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002993 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002994 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002995
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002996Extension modules
2997-----------------
2998
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002999- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
3000 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
3001 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
3002 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
3003
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00003004- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
3005 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
3006
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00003007- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
3008 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
3009 and Greg Chapman.)
3010
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00003011- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
3012 recursively.
3013
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00003014- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00003015 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
3016 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
3017 leaks.
3018
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00003019- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
3020
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00003021- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
3022 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
3023 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
3024 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
3025 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
3026 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
3027 #705836.
3028
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00003029- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00003030 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
3031
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00003032- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
3033 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
3034 See SF bug #692416.
3035
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00003036- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
3037 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
3038
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00003039- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
3040 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
3041 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003042
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00003043- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00003044 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
3045 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
3046
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00003047- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
3048 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
3049 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
3050 timeouts to work properly.
3051
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003052Library
3053-------
3054
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00003055- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
3056 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
3057 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
3058 future release.
3059
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00003060- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
3061 for querying platform dependent features.
3062
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00003063- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00003064
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00003065- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
3066 pickle protocol versions.
3067
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00003068- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
3069 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
3070 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
3071
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00003072- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
3073
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00003074- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
3075 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
3076 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
3077 modules.
3078
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00003079- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
3080 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
3081 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
3082
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00003083- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
3084 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
3085
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00003086- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
3087 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
3088 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
3089
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003090- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00003091 MS Office extensions.
3092
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00003093- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
3094 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
3095
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00003096- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
3097 execution speed of expressions and statements.
3098
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003099- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
3100 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
3101 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
3102 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
3103 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
3104 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
3105
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00003106- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
3107 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
3108 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003109
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00003110- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
3111 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
3112 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
3113
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00003114- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
3115
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00003116- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
3117 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
3118 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
3119
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003120Tools/Demos
3121-----------
3122
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00003123- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
3124 See the module docstring for details.
3125
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003126Build
3127-----
3128
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00003129- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
3130 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003131
3132C API
3133-----
3134
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003135- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
3136
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00003137- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
3138 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
3139 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
3140
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003141- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
3142 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00003143
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003144 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
3145 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
3146 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00003147
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00003148- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00003149 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
3150
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00003151- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
3152 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
3153 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003154
3155New platforms
3156-------------
3157
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00003158None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003159
3160Tests
3161-----
3162
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00003163- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
3164 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003165
3166Windows
3167-------
3168
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00003169- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
3170 function.
3171
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00003172- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
3173 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003174
3175Mac
3176---
3177
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00003178- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
3179 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00003180
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00003181- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
3182 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003183
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00003184- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
3185 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
3186 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003187
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003188- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00003189 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
3190 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003191
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003192- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
3193 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003194
3195
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003196What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
3197=================================
3198
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003199*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003200
3201Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003202-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003203
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00003204- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
3205 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
3206 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
3207
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00003208- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
3209 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
3210 (SF patch #664376.)
3211
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003212- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
3213 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
3214 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
3215 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
3216 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
3217 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00003218 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003219
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003220- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
3221 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
3222 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
3223 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003224 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003225
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00003226- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
3227 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
3228 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
3229 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
3230 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
3231 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
3232 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
3233 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
3234 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
3235 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
3236 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
3237
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00003238- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
3239 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
3240 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
3241 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
3242 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
3243 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
3244
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00003245- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
3246 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
3247
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00003248- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
3249 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
3250 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
3251 case.)
3252
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00003253- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
3254 passed as unicode strings.
3255
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00003256- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
3257 See SF bug #683467.
3258
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00003259- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
3260 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
3261
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00003262- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
3263
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00003264- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
3265
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00003266- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
3267 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
3268 arguments.
3269
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00003270- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
3271 See SF bug #667147.
3272
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003273- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003274 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003275 See SF bug #676155.
3276
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003277- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003278 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003279 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
3280 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
3281 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
3282 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
3283 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
3284 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003285
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003286Extension modules
3287-----------------
3288
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003289- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
3290 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3291 tp_as_number pointer.
3292
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003293- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
3294 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
3295 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
3296 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
3297 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
3298
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003299- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
3300
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00003301- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
3302
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003303- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00003304 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003305 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
3306 patch #678531.)
3307
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00003308- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
3309 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
3310
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00003311- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
3312 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
3313
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00003314- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
3315
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00003316- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
3317 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
3318 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
3319
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003320- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
3321
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003322- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
3323 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
3324
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003325- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003326
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003327- datetime changes:
3328
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00003329 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
3330
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003331 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
3332 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
3333 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
3334 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
3335 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
3336 now.
3337
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003338 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003339 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
3340 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003341
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003342 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003343 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003344 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
3345 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
3346 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
3347 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003348
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003349 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
3350 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
3351 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003352 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
3353
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003354 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
3355 by a later example coded by Guido.
3356
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003357 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003358 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
3359 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
3360 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003361 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
3362 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
3363
3364 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
3365 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
3366 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
3367 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
3368 tzinfo subclass instance.
3369
3370 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
3371 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
3372 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
3373 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
3374 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
3375 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
3376 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
3377 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003378
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003379 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
3380 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3381 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3382 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3383 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003384 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3385
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003386 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003387
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003388 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3389 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3390 as a naive datetime object.
3391
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003392 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3393 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3394 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3395
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003396 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3397 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3398 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3399 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3400 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3401 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3402 comparison.
3403
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003404 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3405 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3406 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3407 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003408 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003409
3410 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003411
3412 and ::
3413
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003414 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3415
3416 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3417 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3418 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3419 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3420
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003421 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3422 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3423 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3424 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3425 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3426
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003427 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3428 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003429 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3430 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003431
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003432Library
3433-------
3434
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003435- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3436 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3437
3438- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3439 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3440 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3441 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3442 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3443 See PEP 307 for details.
3444
3445- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3446 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3447
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003448- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3449 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003450 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003451 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3452 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003453 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003454
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003455- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3456 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3457
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003458- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3459 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3460 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3461
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003462- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3463
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003464- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3465 exception.
3466
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003467- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3468 class.
3469
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003470- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3471 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3472 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3473
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003474- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3475 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3476
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003477- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003478 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3479 See SF bug #659228.
3480
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003481- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3482 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3483 See SF patch #651082.
3484
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003485- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003486
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003487- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3488 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3489
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003490- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003491 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003492
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003493- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3494 DOS paths from other platforms.
3495
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003496Tools/Demos
3497-----------
3498
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003499- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3500 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3501 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3502 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3503 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3504 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3505 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3506 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3507 example:
3508
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003509 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3510 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003511
3512 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3513
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003514
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003515Build
3516-----
3517
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003518- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3519 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3520 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003521 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3522
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003523 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3524
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003525- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3526 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3527 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3528 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3529 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3530 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3531 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3532 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3533 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3534
3535- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3536 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3537 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3538 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3539
3540- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3541 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3542
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003543C API
3544-----
3545
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003546- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3547 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003548
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003549- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3550 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3551 tp_as_number pointer.
3552
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003553- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3554 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3555 (SF #681367)
3556
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003557- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3558 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3559 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3560 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003561
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003562Tests
3563-----
3564
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003565- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003566 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3567 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3568 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3569 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3570 pydoc.)
3571
3572- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3573
3574- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003575
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003576Windows
3577-------
3578
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003579- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3580 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3581 time).
3582
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003583- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3584 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3585
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003586- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3587 release without strong cryptography.
3588
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003589- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003590 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003591
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003592- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3593 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3594
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003595Mac
3596---
3597
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003598- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3599 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003600
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003601- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3602 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3603 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003604
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003605- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3606 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003607
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003608- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3609 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3610 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3611 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003612
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003613- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003614 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3615 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3616 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003617
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003618
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003619What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003620=================================
3621
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003622*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003623
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003624Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003625--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003626
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003627- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3628
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003629- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3630 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003631 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003632 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003633 a different meaning than before.
3634
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003635- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003636 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003637 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003638
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003639- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003640 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003641 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003642
3643- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3644 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3645 and deallocation.
3646
3647- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3648 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3649
3650- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3651 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3652 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3653 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3654 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3655
3656- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3657 now detected by the garbage collector.
3658
3659- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3660 [SF bug 519621]
3661
3662- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3663 identifier.
3664
3665- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3666 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3667 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3668 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3669 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3670 [SF bug 563060]
3671
3672- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3673 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3674 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3675 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3676 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3677
3678- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3679 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3680 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3681
3682- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3683
3684- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3685 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3686 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3687 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3688 state of the slots would be lost.)
3689
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003690Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003691-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003692
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003693- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003694 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3695 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3696 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3697 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003698 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3699 Jython 2.1.
3700
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003701- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003702 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003703 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3704 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3705 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3706 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3707 these, see PEP 302.
3708
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003709- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3710 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3711 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3712
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003713- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3714 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3715 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3716
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003717- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3718 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3719 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3720
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003721- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3722 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3723 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3724 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3725 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3726 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3727 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3728 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3729 releases or implementations.
3730
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003731- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003732 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3733 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003734
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003735- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3736 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3737
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003738- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3739 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3740 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3741
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003742- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3743 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3744
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003745- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3746 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003747 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3748 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003749
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003750- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3751 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3752 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3753 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3754 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3755
3756 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3757 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3758 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3759 pattern.
3760
3761 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3762 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3763 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3764 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3765
3766 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3767 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3768 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3769 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3770 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3771 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3772
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003773- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3774 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3775 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3776 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3777 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3778 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3779 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3780 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003781
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003782- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3783 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3784 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3785 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3786 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003787 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3788 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3789 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3790 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3791 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3792 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3793 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003794
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003795- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3796 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3797
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003798- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3799 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3800 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3801 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3802 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3803 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3804 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3805 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3806 to Zack Weinberg!
3807
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003808- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3809 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3810 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3811 type. This has been fixed now.
3812
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003813- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3814 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3815 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3816
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003817- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3818 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3819 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3820 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3821 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3822 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3823 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3824 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003825 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003826
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003827- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3828 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3829 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003830
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003831- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3832 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3833 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3834 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3835 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3836 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3837 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3838 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003839 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003840 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3841 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3842
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003843- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3844 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3845 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3846 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3847 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3848 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3849 this.)
3850
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003851- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3852 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003853 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003854 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003855 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3856 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003857 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3858 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003859
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003860- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3861 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3862 currently running.
3863
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003864- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3865 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3866 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3867 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3868
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003869- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3870 as directory names.
3871
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003872- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3873 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3874
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003875- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3876 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3877
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003878- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003879 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3880 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003881
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003882- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3883 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3884 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3885 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3886 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3887
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003888- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3889 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3890 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3891 removed.
3892
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003893- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3894 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3895 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3896
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003897- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3898 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3899 to __debug__.
3900
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003901- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3902 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3903 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3904
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003905- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3906 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3907 deprecated now.
3908
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003909- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3910 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3911 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003912
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003913- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3914 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3915 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3916 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3917 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003918
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003919- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3920 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3921
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003922- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3923 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3924 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003925 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003926 is backward compatible.
3927
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003928- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3929 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3930 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3931 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3932 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3933
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003934- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3935 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3936 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3937 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3938 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3939 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003940
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003941- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3942 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3943
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003944- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3945 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3946
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003947- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3948 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3949 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3950 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3951 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3952
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003953- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3954 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3955 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3956
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003957- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003958 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3959
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003960- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3961 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3962 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003963
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003964- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3965 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3966
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003967- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3968 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3969 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3970
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003971- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3972
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003973Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003974-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003975
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003976- Added three operators to the operator module:
3977 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3978 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3979 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3980
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003981- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3982
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003983- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3984 archives.
3985
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003986- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3987 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3988 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3989
3990 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3991
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003992- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3993 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3994 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003995 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003996
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003997- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3998 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3999 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
4000 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00004001 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
4002 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
4003 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
4004 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00004005
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00004006- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
4007 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00004008
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00004009- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
4010
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00004011- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
4012 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
4013
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00004014- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
4015 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
4016 supported.
4017
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00004018- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
4019
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00004020- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
4021 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00004022
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00004023- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
4024 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
4025
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00004026- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
4027
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00004028- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
4029 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
4030
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00004031- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
4032 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
4033 functions but callable type objects.
4034
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004035- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00004036 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004037 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00004038
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00004039- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
4040 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00004041
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00004042- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
4043 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00004044
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00004045- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
4046 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
4047 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
4048 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
4049
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00004050- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
4051 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00004052
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00004053- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
4054 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
4055 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
4056 and __imul__.
4057
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00004058- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00004059 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
4060 is called.
4061
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00004062- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
4063 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
4064 interpreter was compiled.
4065
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00004066- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
4067 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
4068 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004069 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00004070 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
4071 1, not 2.
4072
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00004073- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
4074 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
4075 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
4076 limit.
4077
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00004078- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
4079 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
4080 bug #623464.
4081
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00004082- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
4083 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
4084 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
4085 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
4086
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004087Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004088-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004089
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00004090- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
4091
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00004092- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
4093 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
4094 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
4095 with Python 2.3a2.
4096
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00004097- os.path exposes getctime.
4098
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004099- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004100 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004101 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004102 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004103 unit tests of floating point results.
4104
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00004105- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
4106 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
4107 has been increased.
4108
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00004109- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
4110 executed.
4111
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00004112- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
4113 postinstallation script.
4114
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00004115- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
4116 test the current module.
4117
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004118- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00004119 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
4120 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
4121 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
4122 this behavior needs to be controlled.
4123
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00004124- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00004125 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00004126 Ward's Optik package.
4127
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00004128- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
4129 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
4130 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
4131 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
4132
4133- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
4134 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00004135 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00004136
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00004137- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
4138 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
4139 shelf are binary pickles.
4140
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00004141- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
4142 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
4143
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00004144- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
4145 modules are iterators now.
4146
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00004147- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
4148 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
4149 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
4150 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
4151 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
4152 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004153
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00004154- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
4155 with their entity value.
4156
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00004157- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
4158
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004159- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
4160 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00004161
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004162- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
4163 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004164 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00004165
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00004166- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
4167 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
4168 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
4169 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
4170 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
4171 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
4172 main():
4173
4174 import locale
4175 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
4176
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00004177- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
4178 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
4179
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00004180- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
4181 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
4182 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
4183 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
4184 to the new standard.
4185
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00004186- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
4187 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
4188 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
4189 an extension to the database.
4190
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004191- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
4192 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
4193 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
4194 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00004195 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004196
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004197- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00004198 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004199
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00004200- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
4201 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
4202 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
4203 bounded integers.
4204
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00004205- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
4206 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
4207 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
4208 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
4209 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
4210 in existence.
4211
4212 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
4213 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
4214 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
4215 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
4216 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
4217 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
4218
4219 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
4220 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
4221 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
4222 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
4223
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00004224- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
4225 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
4226 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
4227
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00004228- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
4229
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004230- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
4231 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
4232 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
4233 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
4234
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00004235- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
4236 argument.
4237
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00004238- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
4239 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
4240 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
4241 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
4242 [SF patch 560794].
4243
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004244- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
4245 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
4246 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00004247 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
4248 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
4249 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004250
4251- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
4252 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00004253
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00004254- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
4255 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
4256 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
4257 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00004258
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00004259- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
4260 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
4261 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
4262 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
4263 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
4264
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004265- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00004266
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00004267- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
4268
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00004269- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
4270 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
4271 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
4272 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
4273 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
4274 identical to None.
4275
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00004276- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
4277 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
4278 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
4279 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
4280 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
4281 results now.
4282
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00004283- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
4284 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
4285
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004286- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
4287 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
4288 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
4289 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
4290 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
4291 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
4292 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
4293 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
4294
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00004295- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
4296
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00004297- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
4298 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
4299
4300- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
4301 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
4302 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
4303 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
4304 and other systems.
4305
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004306- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
4307 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
4308 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
4309 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 +00004310 work well with these.
4311
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00004312- compileall now supports quiet operation.
4313
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004314- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00004315 connections.
4316
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00004317- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
4318 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
4319 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
4320
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00004321- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
4322 sets
4323
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00004324- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
4325 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
4326 name.
4327
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00004328- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
4329 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
4330 passed in.
4331
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004332- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00004333 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00004334 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
4335 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00004336
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00004337- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
4338
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00004339- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
4340
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00004341- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
4342 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
4343 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
4344
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004345- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
4346 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
4347 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
4348 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00004349 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004350
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004351- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004352 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004353 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004354
4355- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
4356 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
4357 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
4358
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004359- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00004360 the value of its expression argument.
4361
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004362- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
4363 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
4364 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
4365
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00004366- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
4367 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
4368 skipstone browser was included.
4369
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00004370- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
4371 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
4372
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004373Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004374-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004375
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00004376- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
4377 names in addition to accepting file names.
4378
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00004379- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
4380 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4381 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4382 still used and useful.)
4383
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004384- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4385 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4386 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4387 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004388
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004389- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4390 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4391 the generated binary.
4392
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004393Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004394-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004395
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004396- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4397
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004398- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4399 except in the hands of experts.
4400
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004401- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004402 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4403 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4404 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004405
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004406- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4407 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4408 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4409 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4410 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4411 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4412 builds.
4413
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004414- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4415 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4416 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4417 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4418 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4419 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4420 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4421 new type.
4422
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004423- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004424
4425 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4426 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4427 positive infinities.
4428
4429 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4430 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4431 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4432 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4433 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4434 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4435 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4436
4437 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4438
4439 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4440
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004441- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4442 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4443 size of the executable.
4444
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004445- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4446 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4447 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4448 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004449
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004450- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4451
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004452- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4453 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4454 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004455
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004456- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4457 well as Unix.
4458
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004459- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4460 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4461 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4462 modules in the README file for details.
4463
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004464C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004465-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004466
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004467- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4468 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004469 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004470 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004471 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004472
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004473- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4474 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4475 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4476 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4477 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4478 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004479 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004480 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4481 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4482 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4483 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4484 aligned.)
4485
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004486- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4487 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4488 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4489
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004490- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4491 level.
4492
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004493- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4494 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4495 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4496 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4497 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4498
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004499- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4500 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4501 code.
4502
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004503- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4504 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4505 adjusting for negative indices.
4506
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004507- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4508 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4509 object.
4510
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004511- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4512 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4513 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4514
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004515- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4516 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004517
4518- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4519
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004520- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4521 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4522 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4523 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4524
4525- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4526
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004527- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004528
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004529- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004530 without going through the buffer API.
4531
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004532- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004533
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004534- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4535 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4536 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4537 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4538
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004539- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4540 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4541
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004542- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004543 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4544
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004545New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004546-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004547
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004548- OpenVMS is now supported.
4549
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004550- AtheOS is now supported.
4551
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004552- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4553
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004554- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4555
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004556Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004557-----
4558
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004559- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4560 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4561 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004562
4563Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004564-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004565
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004566- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4567 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4568 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4569 bugs.
4570 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004571 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004572 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4573 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004574 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004575
4576- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004577 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004578
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004579- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4580 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4581
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004582- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4583 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004584 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004585 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4586
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004587- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4588 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4589 use files" uninstall option).
4590
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004591- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4592
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004593- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4594 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4595
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004596- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4597 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4598 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4599
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004600- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4601 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4602 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4603 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4604 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004605 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4606 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4607 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004608
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004609- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004610 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004611 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4612 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4613 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4614 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4615 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4616 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4617 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4618 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4619 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4620 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4621 work around.
4622
4623- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4624 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4625 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4626 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4627 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4628 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4629 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4630 specified with O_CREAT too).
4631
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004632Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004633----
4634
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004635- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004636
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004637- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4638 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4639 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4640
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004641- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4642 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4643 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4644
4645- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4646 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4647 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4648 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4649 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4650 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4651 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4652 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004653
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004654- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4655 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4656 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004657
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004658- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4659 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4660 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4661 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4662 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004663
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004664- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4665 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4666 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004667
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004668- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4669 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004670
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004671- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4672 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4673 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4674 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4675 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004676
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004677- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4678 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4679 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4680
4681- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4682 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4683 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004684
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004685- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4686 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4687 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4688 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004689 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004690
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004691- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4692 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004693
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004694- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4695 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004696
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004697- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004698 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004699 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4700 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004701
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004702
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004703What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004704===============================
4705
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004706*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4707
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004708Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004709--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004710
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004711- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4712 with a custom metaclass.
4713
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004714Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004715-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004716
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004717- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4718 are proxies.
4719
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004720Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004721-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004722
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004723- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4724 very short strings.
4725
4726- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4727 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4728 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4729 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4730 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4731
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004732Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004733-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004734
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004735- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4736 close or delete time).
4737
4738- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4739 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4740
4741- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4742
4743- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004744 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004745
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004746Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004747-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004748
4749Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004750-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004751
4752C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004753-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004754
4755New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004756-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004757
4758Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004759-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004760
4761Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004762-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004763
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004764- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4765
4766- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4767 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4768
4769- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4770 deleted at process exit time.
4771
4772- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4773 in backslash.
4774
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004775Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004776----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004777
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004778- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4779 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4780 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4781
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004782
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004783What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004784===========================
4785
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004786*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4787
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004788Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004789--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004790
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004791- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4792 been extensively updated. See
4793
4794 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4795
4796 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4797
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004798- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4799 deleted!
4800
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004801- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4802 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4803 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4804 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4805 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4806
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004807- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4808
4809 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4810 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4811
4812 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4813 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4814 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4815 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4816 supported anyway.
4817
4818 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4819 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4820
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004821- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4822 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4823 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4824 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4825 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004826
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004827- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4828 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4829 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4830
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004831Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004832-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004833
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004834- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4835 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4836 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4837 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4838 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4839 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004840 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4841 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4842 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4843 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004844
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004845- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4846 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4847 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4848
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004849Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004850-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004851
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004852- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4853
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004854Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004855-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004856
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004857- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4858 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4859 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4860 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4861 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4862 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4863
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004864- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4865
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004866- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4867
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004868- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4869
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004870- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4871 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4872 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4873
4874- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4875
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004876Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004877-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004878
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004879- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4880 off a search on Google.
4881
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004882Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004883-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004884
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004885- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4886 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4887 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4888 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4889 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4890 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4891 other platforms should do likewise.
4892
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004893- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4894 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4895 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4896
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004897C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004898-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004899
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004900- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4901 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4902 producing key-value pairs.
4903
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004904- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004905 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004906 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4907 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4908 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4909 previously went unchallenged.
4910
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004911New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004912-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004913
4914Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004915-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004916
4917Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004918-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004919
4920Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004921----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004922
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004923- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4924 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004925
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004926- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4927 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4928 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4929 home.
4930
4931
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004932What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004933===========================
4934
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004935*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4936
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004937Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004938--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004939
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004940- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4941 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004942
4943 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004944 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004945
4946 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4947 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004948 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004949 This needs to be documented.
4950
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004951- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4952 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4953
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004954- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4955 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4956 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4957
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004958- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4959 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4960
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004961- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4962 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4963 class forbids it).
4964
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004965- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4966 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4967 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4968
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004969- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4970
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004971Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004972-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004973
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004974- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4975 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004976 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004977
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004978- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4979 (like 1 + '').
4980
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004981Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004982-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004983
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004984- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4985 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4986 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4987 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004988 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004989 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4990
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004991- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4992 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4993 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4994 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4995
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004996- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4997 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004998 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4999 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
5000 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00005001
5002- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
5003 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00005004
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00005005- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
5006 bytes on its input.
5007
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005008Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005009-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005010
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00005011- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00005012 convenience function.
5013
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00005014- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
5015 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
5016 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005017 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
5018 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
5019 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
5020 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
5021 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
5022 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00005023
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00005024- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
5025 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
5026 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
5027 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
5028
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00005029- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
5030 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
5031 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
5032
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00005033- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
5034 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
5035 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
5036 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
5037
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005038- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
5039 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005040 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005041 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
5042 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
5043 new -l and -e options.
5044
5045- statcache is now deprecated.
5046
5047- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
5048 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005049 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005050 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
5051 time properly taken into account.
5052
5053- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
5054 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
5055 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
5056 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
5057
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005058Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005059-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005060
5061Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005062-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005063
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005064- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
5065 is built with libdb3 if available.
5066
5067- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
5068
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005069C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005070-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005071
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00005072- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
5073 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
5074 PySequence_Size().
5075
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005076- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
5077
5078- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
5079 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
5080 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
5081
5082- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
5083 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
5084
5085- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
5086 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
5087
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005088New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005089-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005090
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00005091- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
5092 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
5093
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00005094- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
5095 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
5096
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00005097- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
5098
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005099Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005100-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005101
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00005102- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
5103 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
5104
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005105Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005106-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005107
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005108Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005109----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005110
5111- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
5112 removed completely in the next release.
5113
5114- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
5115 OSX.
5116
5117- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
5118 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
5119
5120- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
5121
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005122
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005123What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005124===========================
5125
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005126*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
5127
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005128Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005129--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005130
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005131- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005132 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005133 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005134 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
5135 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005136 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
5137 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005138 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
5139 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00005140
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00005141- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
5142 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
5143
5144- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
5145 class methods, static methods, and properties.
5146
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005147Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005148-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005149
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00005150- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
5151 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
5152 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
5153 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
5154 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
5155 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
5156 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
5157 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
5158
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005159- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
5160 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
5161 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
5162 example).
5163
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005164- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005165 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005166 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005167 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005168
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005169- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
5170 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
5171 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00005172 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005173
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005174- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
5175 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
5176 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
5177 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
5178 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
5179 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
5180
5181 isinstance(x, (A, B))
5182
5183 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
5184
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005185Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005186-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005187
5188- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
5189
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005190- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
5191
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005192- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
5193 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00005194
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005195- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
5196 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
5197 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
5198 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
5199 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
5200 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00005201 attributes.
5202
5203- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
5204 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
5205 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00005206
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005207- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
5208 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
5209 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005210
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005211- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
5212 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
5213 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005214 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
5215 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
5216
5217- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
5218 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005219
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005220Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005221-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005222
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00005223- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
5224 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
5225
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005226- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
5227 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
5228 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
5229 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
5230
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00005231- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
5232 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
5233 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
5234 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
5235
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00005236 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
5237 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
5238 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
5239 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
5240 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
5241 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
5242 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
5243 without losing information).
5244
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005245- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005246 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
5247 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
5248 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
5249 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
5250 module).
5251
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00005252 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005253 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
5254 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
5255 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
5256 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005257
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005258- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00005259 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
5260 encoding.
5261
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00005262- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
5263 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
5264
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005265- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005266 to allow saving the message body to a file.
5267
5268- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
5269 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
5270 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
5271 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
5272
5273- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
5274
5275- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
5276 ON, and OFF.
5277
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005278- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
5279 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
5280
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005281Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005282-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005283
5284- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
5285 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
5286 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005287
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005288- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
5289 been added: -X and -E.
5290
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005291Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005292-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005293
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005294- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
5295 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
5296
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005297C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005298-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005299
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00005300- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
5301 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
5302 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
5303 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
5304 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
5305
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00005306- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
5307 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
5308 as long) arguments.
5309
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005310- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
5311 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
5312 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
5313 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
5314 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
5315 report any bugs or strange behavior).
5316
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005317- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
5318 input.
5319
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005320New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005321-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005322
5323Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005324-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005325
5326Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005327-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005328
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00005329- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
5330 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
5331 is created for .py and .pyw files.
5332
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005333- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
5334 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
5335 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005336 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005337
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005338 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
5339 # (SIGINT) behavior.
5340 import signal
5341 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005342
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005343 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005344 while 1:
5345 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005346 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005347 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
5348 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
5349 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
5350 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005351
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005352
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005353What's New in Python 2.2a4?
5354===========================
5355
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005356*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
5357
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005358Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005359--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005360
5361- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
5362 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
5363 documentation for all operations on list objects.
5364
5365- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
5366 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
5367 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
5368 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
5369 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
5370 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
5371 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005372
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005373- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005374 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005375 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
5376 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
5377 associate a docstring with a property.
5378
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005379- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
5380 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5381 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5382 other built-in object types.
5383
5384- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5385 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5386 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5387 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5388 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5389
5390- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5391 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5392
5393- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5394 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005395 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005396 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5397 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5398 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5399 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5400 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5401
5402- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5403 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5404 class.
5405
5406- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5407 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5408 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5409 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5410
5411- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5412 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5413 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5414 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5415
5416- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5417 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5418
5419- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5420 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5421 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5422 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5423 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005424 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005425 with the same value as s.
5426
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005427- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5428
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005429Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005430----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005431
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005432- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5433
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005434- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5435 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5436 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5437 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5438 objects.
5439
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005440- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5441 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005442 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5443 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5444
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005445- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5446 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5447 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5448
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005449Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005450-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005451
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005452- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5453 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5454 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5455 by the instances.
5456
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005457- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5458 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5459 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5460
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005461- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5462 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5463 before the entire comparison is complete.
5464
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005465- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5466 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5467 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5468
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005469- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5470 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5471 getwriter().
5472
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005473- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5474 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5475
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005476- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005477 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5478 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5479
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005480- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5481 iterable object.
5482
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005483- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5484 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005485
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005486- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5487 authentication.
5488
5489- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5490 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005491
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005492- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005493 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5494 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5495 a sample driver.)
5496
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005497Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005498-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005499
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005500- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5501 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5502 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5503 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5504 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5505 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5506 kernel has large file support.
5507
5508- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5509 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5510 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5511 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5512 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5513
5514- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5515 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5516 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5517
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005518C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005519-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005520
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005521- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5522 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5523
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005524New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005525-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005526
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005527- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5528 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5529
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005530Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005531-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005532
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005533- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5534 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5535 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5536 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5537 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5538
5539- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5540 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5541 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5542 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5543
5544- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5545 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5546
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005547Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005548-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005549
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005550- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005551 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5552 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005553
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005554
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005555What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5556===========================
5557
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005558*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5559
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005560Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005561----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005562
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005563- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5564 big to represent as a C double.
5565
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005566- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5567 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5568 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5569 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5570 restriction).
5571
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005572- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5573 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5574 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5575 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5576 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5577
5578 >>> dir([])
5579 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5580 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5581 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5582 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5583 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5584 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5585 'reverse', 'sort']
5586
5587 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5588
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005589- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005590 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5591 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5592 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5593 OverflowError exception.
5594
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005595- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005596 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005597 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5598 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5599 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5600 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5601 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005602 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005603 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5604 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5605
5606 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5607 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5608 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5609 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005610
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005611- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005612 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5613 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5614 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5615 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5616 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5617 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5618 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5619 once it is created.
5620
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005621- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5622 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5623 (key, value) pairs.
5624
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005625- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005626 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5627 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5628
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005629- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5630 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5631 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5632 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5633 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005634
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005635- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005636 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5637 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5638
5639 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5640
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005641- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005642 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5643
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005644Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005645-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005646
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005647- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005648 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5649 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005650
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005651- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5652 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5653 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5654 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5655 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5656 in this area anymore).
5657
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005658- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5659 threading.Timer.
5660
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005661- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5662 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5663
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005664- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005665 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5666
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005667- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005668 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5669 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5670 converted to Python longs.
5671
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005672- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005673 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5674
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005675- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5676 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5677 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5678
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005679Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005680-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005681
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005682- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5683 division operators as per PEP 238.
5684
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005685Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005686-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005687
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005688- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5689 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5690 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5691 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5692
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005693C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005694-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005695
5696- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005697
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005698- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5699 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005700 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005701
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005702 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5703 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005704 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005705 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005706
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005707- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005708 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5709 module:
5710
5711 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005712
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005713 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5714 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005715
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005716 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5717 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005718
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005719 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5720
5721 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5722
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005723- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005724 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5725 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5726 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005727
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005728New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005729-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005730
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005731- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5732 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5733 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5734 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5735 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005736
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005737Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005738-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005739
5740Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005741-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005742
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005743- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5744 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5745 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5746 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005747 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5748 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5749 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5750 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5751 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005752
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005753- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005754 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5755
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005756
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005757What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5758===========================
5759
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005760*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5761
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005762Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005763-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005764
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005765- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5766 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5767
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005768- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5769 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5770 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005771
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005772- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5773 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5774 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5775 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005776
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005777- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5778
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005779- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005780
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005781Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005782-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005783
5784- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005785 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005786 the module docstring for details.
5787
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005788Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005789-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005790
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005791- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005792 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5793 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5794 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005795
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005796- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5797 Nick Mathewson.
5798
5799Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005800----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005801
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005802- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5803 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5804 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5805 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5806 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5807 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5808 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5809 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5810
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005811- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5812 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5813 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5814 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5815
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005816- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5817 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5818 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5819 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5820 come a long way).
5821
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005822- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5823 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5824 write filters for these warnings).
5825
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005826- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5827 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5828 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5829 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5830 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5831
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005832- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5833 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5834 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5835 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5836 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5837 older distribution.
5838
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005839Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005840-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005841
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005842- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5843 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005844 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005845
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005846- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5847 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5848 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5849
5850- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5851
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005852- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5853
5854- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5855
5856- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5857
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005858- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005859
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005860- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5861
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005862New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005863-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005864
5865C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005866-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005867
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005868- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5869 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5870 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5871 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5872 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5873 against buffer overruns.
5874
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005875- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005876 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5877 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005878 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5879 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5880 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5881
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005882- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5883 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5884 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5885 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5886 deprecated.
5887
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005888Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005889-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005890
5891- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5892 relevant is found.
5893
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005894
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005895What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005896===========================
5897
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005898*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5899
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005900Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005901----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005902
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005903- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5904 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5905 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5906 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5907 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5908 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5909 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5910 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005911 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005912 repaired.
5913
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005914- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005915 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005916 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5917 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5918 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5919 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5920 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5921 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5922 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5923 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5924
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005925- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5926 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5927 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5928 leading BMO character).
5929
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005930- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5931 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5932 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5933
5934 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5935 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5936 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005937
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005938 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5939 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5940 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5941 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5942 for various simple to use conversions.
5943
5944 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5945 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5946
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005947 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5948 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5949 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5950 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5951 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5952 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5953 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5954 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5955 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5956 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5957 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5958 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5959 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5960 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5961 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005962
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005963- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5964 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5965 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005966 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005967 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005968
5969 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005970 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5971 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5972 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5973 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5974 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005975 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5976 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005977
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005978 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5979 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5980 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005981 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005982
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005983- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5984 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5985 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5986 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5987 floating arithmetic,
5988
5989 x = 9007199254740992.0
5990 print long(x)
5991
5992 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5993 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5994 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5995 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5996 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5997 functions are of good quality).
5998
5999 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
6000 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
6001 algorithms to break.
6002
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00006003- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
6004 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
6005 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
6006 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
6007 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
6008 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
6009 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
6010 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
6011 order.
6012
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00006013- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
6014 operation along the most common code paths.
6015
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00006016- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
6017 the same as dict.has_key(x).
6018
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00006019- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
6020 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
6021 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
6022 {}.update(UserDict())
6023
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00006024- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
6025 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
6026 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
6027 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
6028 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
6029 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
6030 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
6031 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
6032
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00006033- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00006034 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006035
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00006036 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00006037 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
6038 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00006039 join() method of strings
6040 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00006041 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
6042 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006043 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00006044 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00006045
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00006046- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
6047 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
6048
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00006049- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
6050 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
6051
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00006052- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
6053 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
6054 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
6055 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
6056
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00006057- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
6058 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00006059 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00006060 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
6061 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00006062
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00006063- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
6064
6065
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006066Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006067-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006068
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00006069- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006070 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00006071 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
6072 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
6073
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00006074- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
6075 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
6076
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00006077- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
6078 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
6079 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
6080 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
6081
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00006082- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
6083 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
6084 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
6085
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00006086- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
6087
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00006088- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
6089
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00006090- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
6091 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
6092 that are still imported into string.py).
6093
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006094- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
6095
6096- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
6097 Now it does.
6098
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00006099- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
6100
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00006101- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
6102 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
6103 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
6104 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
6105 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00006106 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
6107 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00006108
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00006109- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
6110 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
6111 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
6112 'help(object)'.
6113
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006114Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006115-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006116
6117- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006118 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006119 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
6120 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
6121
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006122- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00006123 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
6124 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006125
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00006126C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006127-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00006128
6129- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
6130 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006131
6132----
6133
6134**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**