blob: 5eb20ab92636a83da008c1eb24697b48ceed47e0 [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2006*
11
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000012Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Georg Brandl80bbf3f2005-09-14 19:38:29 +000015- SF bug #893549: parsing keyword arguments was broken with a few format
16 codes.
17
Guido van Rossum8ee3e5a2005-09-14 18:09:42 +000018- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on AIX 5.3
19 with IBM's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1284289). This also closes SF
20 bug #105470: test_pwd fails on 64bit system (Opteron).
21
Guido van Rossum539c6622005-09-14 17:49:54 +000022- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on HP-UX 11 on
23 Itanium2 with HP's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1225212).
24
Georg Brandl4550b8d2005-08-26 06:43:52 +000025- Disallow keyword arguments for type constructors that don't use them
Georg Brandl02c42872005-08-26 06:42:30 +000026 (fixes bug #1119418).
27
Martin v. Löwisd35edda2005-08-24 08:39:24 +000028- Forward UnicodeDecodeError into SyntaxError for source encoding errors.
29
Barry Warsawe2eca0b2005-08-15 18:14:19 +000030- SF bug #900092: When tracing (e.g. for hotshot), restore 'return' events for
31 exceptions that cause a function to exit.
32
Raymond Hettinger9f1a6792005-07-31 01:16:36 +000033- The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
34 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
35 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
36
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +000037- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
38
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +000039- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
40 reference counts in some error exit cases.
41
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000042- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
43 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
44 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
45 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
46 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
47 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
48 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
49 realloc.
50
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +000051- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
52 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
53
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +000054- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
55 like their int counterparts.
56
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +000057- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
58 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
59 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
60 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
61 for a longer write-up of the problem).
62
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +000063- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
64 serializing floats.
65
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +000066- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
67 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
68 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
69
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +000070- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
71 278.
72
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +000073- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
74 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
75 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
76 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +000077 to the base class has been moved to the proper nb_* magic slot and out of
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +000078 PyNumber_*().
79 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
80
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +000081- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
82 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
83 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
84 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
85
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +000086- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
87 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
88 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
89 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
90 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
91
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +000092- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
93 disabled caused a crash.
94
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +000095- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
96 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
97
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000098- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000099 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
100
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +0000101- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
102
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000103- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +0000104 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
105 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
106 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000107
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +0000108- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
109
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +0000110- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
111 returning None.
112
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000113- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +0000114 ('\') with a specific error message.
115
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +0000116- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
117
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +0000118- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
119 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
120
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000121- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000122 an ferror() call.
123
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000124- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
125 list.sort().
126
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000127- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
128 (2+3) --> (5).
129
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000130- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
131
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000132- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
133 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000134
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000135- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
136 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
137 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
138
Neil Schemenauercf52c072005-08-12 17:34:58 +0000139- Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a
140 unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and
141 calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance.
142
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000143Extension Modules
144-----------------
145
Martin v. Löwis8b291e22005-09-18 08:17:56 +0000146- Patch #1213831: Fix typo in unicodedata._getcode.
147
Georg Brandlfb1ef852005-09-14 20:53:32 +0000148- Bug #1007046: os.startfile() did not accept unicode strings encoded in
149 the file system encoding.
150
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000151- Patch #756021: Special-case socket.inet_aton('255.255.255.255') for
152 platforms that don't have inet_aton().
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000153
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000154- Bug #1215928: Fix bz2.BZ2File.seek() for 64-bit file offsets.
155
156- Bug #1191043: Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines for files containing one
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000157 line without newlines.
158
Georg Brandl38387b82005-08-24 07:17:40 +0000159- Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did
160 on Windows.
161
Martin v. Löwisebd9d5b2005-08-09 15:00:59 +0000162- Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
163 st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
164
Michael W. Hudson8137bea2005-07-27 20:24:40 +0000165- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
166 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
167 for large or negative values.
168
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000169- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000170 implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false.
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000171
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000172- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
173
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000174- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
175 if available on the platform.
176
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000177- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
178 available on the platform.
179
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000180- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
181 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
182
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000183- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
184
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000185- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
186 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
187 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
188
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000189- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
190
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000191- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
192 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
193
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000194- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000195 file size.
196
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000197- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
198
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000199- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
200 {remove_history,replace_history}
201
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000202- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
203 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000204
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000205- stat_float_times is now True.
206
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000207- array.array objects are now picklable.
208
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000209- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
210 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
211
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000212- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
213 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
214 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
215
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000216- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
217 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000218
219Library
220-------
221
Martin v. Löwis4ed67382005-09-18 08:34:39 +0000222- Patch #1268314: Cache lines in StreamReader.readlines for performance.
223
Brett Cannona783d062005-09-15 02:34:56 +0000224- Bug #1290505: Fix clearing the regex cache for time.strptime().
225
Martin v. Löwis5dbdc592005-08-27 10:07:56 +0000226- Bug #1167128: Fix size of a symlink in a tarfile to be 0.
227
Georg Brandl5a650a22005-08-26 08:51:34 +0000228- Patch #810023: Fix off-by-one bug in urllib.urlretrieve reporthook
229 functionality.
230
Martin v. Löwis8b595142005-08-25 11:03:38 +0000231- Bug #1163178: Make IDNA return an empty string when the input is empty.
232
Georg Brandl532efab2005-08-24 22:34:21 +0000233- Patch #848017: Make Cookie more RFC-compliant. Use CRLF as default output
234 separator and do not output trailing semicola.
235
Georg Brandlb9256022005-08-24 18:46:39 +0000236- Patch #1062060: urllib.urlretrieve() now raises a new exception, named
237 ContentTooShortException, when the actually downloaded size does not
238 match the Content-Length header.
239
Martin v. Löwis0a5d4a22005-08-24 14:55:22 +0000240- Bug #1121494: distutils.dir_utils.mkpath now accepts Unicode strings.
241
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000242- Bug #1178484: Return complete lines from codec stream readers
243 even if there is an exception in later lines, resulting in
244 correct line numbers for decoding errors in source code.
245
Georg Brandl6d2b3462005-08-24 07:36:17 +0000246- Bug #1192315: Disallow negative arguments to clear() in pdb.
247
Martin v. Löwisb813c532005-08-07 20:51:04 +0000248- Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
249
Georg Brandl649f8e72005-08-03 07:30:12 +0000250- Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
251 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
252
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000253- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
254 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
255 Tkdnd.
256
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000257- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
258 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
259
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000260- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
261 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
262
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000263- textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000264 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
265
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000266- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
267 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
268
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000269- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
270 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
271
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000272- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000273 it can be missing in embedded interpreters
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000274
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000275- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
276
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000277- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
278 error messages.
279
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000280- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
281
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000282- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
283 Bug #1224621.
284
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000285- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
286 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
287 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
288 terminates by raising StopIteration.
289
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000290- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
291
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000292- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
293 component of the path.
294
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000295- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
296 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
297 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
298 class at all.
299
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000300- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
301 files to PyPI.
302
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000303- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
304 them to PyPI.
305
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000306- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
307 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
308 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
309 work as expected.
310
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000311- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
312 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
313
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000314- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000315 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
316
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000317- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
318
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000319- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
320 to build.
321
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000322- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
323 symbolic links on Windows.
324
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000325- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000326 profile.py if available.
327
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000328- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
329
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000330- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
331 in LWPCookieJar.
332
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000333- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
334
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000335- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
336
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000337- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
338
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000339- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
340
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000341- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
342
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000343- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
344
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000345- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
346
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000347- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
348
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000349- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
350 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
351 be exploited in various ways.
352
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000353- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
354
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000355- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
356
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000357- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
358
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000359- Enhancements to the csv module:
360
361 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000362 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000363 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000364 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
365 reporting.
366 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
367 dictates.
368 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000369 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000370 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000371 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
372 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000373 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
374 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000375 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000376 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
377 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
378 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
379 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
380 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
381 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
382 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
383 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
384 without first creating a dialect class.
385 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
386 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
387 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000388 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000389 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
390 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000391 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
392 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
393 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
394 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000395 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
396 This has been fixed.
397
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000398- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
399 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
400 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
401 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
402
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000403- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
404
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000405- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
406 (Bug #951915).
407
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000408- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
409 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
410 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000411 encoding alias table.
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000412
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000413- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
414
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000415- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
416 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
417
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000418- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
419
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000420- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
421
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000422- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
423
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000424- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
425
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000426- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
427
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000428- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
429 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
430 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
431
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000432- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000433 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000434
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000435- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
436 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
437 tokenizer with very long source lines.
438
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000439- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
440 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
441
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000442- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
443 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000444
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000445- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
446 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
447
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000448- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
449 correctly.
450
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000451- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
452 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
453 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
454 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
455 between two lines.
456
Walter Dörwalda47d1c02005-08-30 10:23:14 +0000457- Bug #1251300: On UCS-4 builds the "unicode-internal" codec will now complain
458 about illegal code points. The codec now supports PEP 293 style error
459 handlers.
460
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000461- Bug #1235646: ``codecs.StreamRecoder.next()`` now reencodes the data it reads
Walter Dörwaldc5238b82005-09-01 11:56:53 +0000462 from the input stream, so that the output is a byte string in the correct
463 encoding instead of a unicode string.
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000464
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000465- Bug #1202493: Fixing SRE parser to handle '{}' as perl does, rather than
466 considering it exactly like a '*'.
467
468
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000469Build
470-----
471
Martin v. Löwis147fbe52005-08-07 21:09:30 +0000472- Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
473 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
474
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000475- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
476 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
477
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000478- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
479 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
480 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000481 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000482
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000483- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
484 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
485 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
486
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000487- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
488
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000489- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
490 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
491
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000492- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
493 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
494 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
495 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
496 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
497 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
498 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
499 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
500
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000501- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
502 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
503 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
504 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
505
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000506
507C API
508-----
509
Raymond Hettingerbeb31012005-08-16 03:47:52 +0000510- Added a C API for set and frozenset objects.
511
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000512- Removed PyRange_New().
513
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000514
515Tests
516-----
517
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000518- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000519
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000520
521Documentation
522-------------
523
Georg Brandl32252422005-09-14 20:42:00 +0000524- Bug #1274828: Document os.path.splitunc().
525
Georg Brandl79c122f2005-08-24 07:31:33 +0000526- Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py.
527
Georg Brandl6f2bbd32005-08-24 07:26:55 +0000528- Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation.
529
Georg Brandlf13c4ba2005-08-02 10:28:08 +0000530- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
531
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000532- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
533
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000534- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
535
536- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
537
538- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
539
540- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
541
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000542- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
543 Closes bug #1166582.
544
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000545- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
546 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
547 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
548
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000549Mac
550---
551
552
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000553New platforms
554-------------
555
556- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
557
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000558
559Tools/Demos
560-----------
561
Georg Brandl56897312005-08-24 18:32:30 +0000562- Added two new files to Tools/scripts: pysource.py, which recursively
563 finds Python source files, and findnocoding.py, which finds Python
564 source files that need an encoding declaration.
565 Patch #784089, credits to Oleg Broytmann.
566
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000567- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
568
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000569- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000570
571
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000572What's New in Python 2.4 final?
573===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000574
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000575*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000576
577Core and builtins
578-----------------
579
580- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
581 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
582 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
583
584
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000585What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
586==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000587
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000588*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000589
590Core and builtins
591-----------------
592
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000593- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
594 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
595 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
596
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000597
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000598Library
599-------
600
601- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
602 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
603 raised is re-raised.
604
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000605- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
606 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
607
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000608- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
609 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
610 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
611 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
612 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
613 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
614 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
615 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
616 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
617 by the slice are recomputed now.
618
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000619- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000620
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000621Build
622-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000623
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000624- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
625 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
626 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000627
628C API
629-----
630
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000631- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
632
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000633
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000634What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
635================================
636
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000637*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000638
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000639License
640-------
641
642The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
643is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
644changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
645Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
646intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
647durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
648the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
649License::
650
651 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
652
653says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
654to Python 2.1.1.
655
656The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
657License Version 2.
658
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000659Core and builtins
660-----------------
661
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000662- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
663 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
664 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
665 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
666 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
667 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
668 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
669 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
670 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
671 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
672
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000673- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000674
675Extension Modules
676-----------------
677
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000678- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
679 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
680 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
681 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000682
683Library
684-------
685
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000686- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
687 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
688 returned.
689
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000690- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
691
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000692- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
693 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
694
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000695- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
696
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000697- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
698 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000699
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000700- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
701
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000702- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
703
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000704- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000705 the source code is updated and reloaded.
706
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000707Build
708-----
709
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000710- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000711
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000712What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
713================================
714
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000715*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000716
717Core and builtins
718-----------------
719
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000720- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000721 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
722
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000723- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
724 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
725 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
726 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
727
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000728- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
729 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
730
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000731- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
732 constant.
733
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000734- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
735 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
736 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
737 large), and to anomalies such as
738 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
739 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
740 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
741 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000742
743Extension modules
744-----------------
745
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000746- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
747 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000748 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
749 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
750 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000751
752Library
753-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000754
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000755- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000756 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000757 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
758 --swig-cpp.
759
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000760- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
761 it is set.
762
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000763- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000764
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000765- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
766 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
767 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
768 Closes bug #1039270.
769
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000770- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000771
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000772 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000773 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
774 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
775 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
776 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
777 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
778 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
779 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
780 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
781 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
782 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
783 + Updates to documentation.
784
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000785- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
786 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
787 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
788 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
789
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000790- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000791
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000792- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
793 applications should use the getmember function.
794
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000795- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
796
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000797- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
798 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
799 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
800 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
801 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
802 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
803 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
804 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
805 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
806
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000807- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
808 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000809 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000810
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000811- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
812 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
813 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
814 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
815 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
816 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
817 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
818 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000819
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000820- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
821 the new public features (of which there are many).
822
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000823- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000824 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
825 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
826 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
827 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000828 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000829
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000830- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
831
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000832- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
833 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
834 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
835 options.
836
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000837- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
838 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
839 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
840 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
841 conditions under which non-string values work.
842
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000843Build
844-----
845
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000846- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
847 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
848 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
849
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000850- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
851 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
852 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
853 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
854 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000855
856C API
857-----
858
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000859- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
860 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
861
862- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
863
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000864- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
865 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
866 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
867 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
868 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
869 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
870 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
871 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
872 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
873
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000874- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
875
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000876- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
877 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
878 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000879
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000880Tests
881-----
882
883- test__locale ported to unittest
884
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000885Mac
886---
887
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000888- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
889 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
890 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000891
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000892Tools/Demos
893-----------
894
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000895- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
896 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
897 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
898 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
899 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000900
901
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000902What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
903=================================
904
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000905*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000906
907Core and builtins
908-----------------
909
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000910- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000911 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
912
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000913- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
914 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
915 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
916 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
917 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
918 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
919 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
920 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000921 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
922 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
923 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
924 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
925 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000926
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000927- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
928 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
929 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
930 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
931 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
932
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000933- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
934
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000935- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
936 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
937
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000938- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
939 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
940 modified the list.
941
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000942- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
943 functions is now writable.
944
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000945- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
946 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
947 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
948 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
949
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000950- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
951 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
952 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
953 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
954 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000955
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000956- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
957 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
958
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000959Extension modules
960-----------------
961
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000962- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
963
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000964- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
965 data.
966
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000967- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
968 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
969 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
970 supposed to have been truncated away.
971
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000972- Added socket.socketpair().
973
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000974- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
975 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
976
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000977- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000978 versions of Python, have now been removed.
979
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000980Library
981-------
982
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000983- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000984 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000985
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000986- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
987 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
988
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000989- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
990 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
991
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000992- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
993
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000994- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
995 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000996
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000997- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
998 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
999
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +00001000- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
1001
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +00001002- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
1003
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +00001004- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
1005
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +00001006- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
1007 Percivall.
1008
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +00001009- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
1010 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
1011
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001012- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
1013 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
1014 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001015 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001016
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001017- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
1018 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
1019 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
1020 and exponent.
1021
1022- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
1023
1024- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +00001025 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001026 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
1027
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001028- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
1029 to the readline module.
1030
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001031- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001032 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
1033 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001034
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +00001035- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
1036 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
1037 contains symlinks.
1038
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +00001039- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
1040 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
1041
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +00001042- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
1043 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
1044 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1045
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001046- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
1047 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
1048 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
1049 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
1050 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
1051 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
1052 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
1053 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
1054 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
1055 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
1056 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
1057 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
1058 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
1059
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +00001060- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
1061
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001062Tools/Demos
1063-----------
1064
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001065- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
1066 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
1067
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +00001068- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
1069
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001070Build
1071-----
1072
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001073- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
1074 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
1075 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
1076 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
1077 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
1078 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
1079 plans to do so.
1080
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +00001081- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
1082 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
1083
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +00001084- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
1085 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
1086
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001087- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
1088 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
1089
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +00001090- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
1091 GNU/k*BSD systems.
1092
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +00001093- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
1094 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
1095
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001096C API
1097-----
1098
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001099..
1100
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001101Documentation
1102-------------
1103
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001104- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1105 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1106
1107- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1108 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1109 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001110
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001111New platforms
1112-------------
1113
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001114- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1115
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001116Tests
1117-----
1118
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001119..
1120
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001121Windows
1122-------
1123
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001124- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1125 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1126 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1127 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1128 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1129 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1130 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1131 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1132 the problem.
1133
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001134Mac
1135---
1136
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001137..
1138
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001139
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001140What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1141=================================
1142
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001143*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001144
1145Core and builtins
1146-----------------
1147
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001148- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1149 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1150 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1151 sensitive code.
1152
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001153- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001154 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001155
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001156 @staticmethod
1157 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001158
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001159 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001160
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001161- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1162 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1163 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1164 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1165 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1166 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1167 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1168 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1169 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1170 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1171 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1172
1173 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1174 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1175 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1176 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1177 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1178 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1179 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1180
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001181- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1182 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1183
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001184- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001185 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001186
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001187- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001188 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001189 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1190
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001191- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001192 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1193 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1194
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001195- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1196 types that support garbage collection.
1197
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001198- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1199
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001200- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1201 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1202 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1203 Jython.
1204
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001205- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1206
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001207- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1208 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1209
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001210- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1211 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1212 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001213
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001214- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1215 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1216 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1217
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001218Extension modules
1219-----------------
1220
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001221- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1222
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001223Library
1224-------
1225
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001226- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1227 TIS-620
1228
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001229- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1230 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1231 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1232 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1233 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1234 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1235 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1236 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1237 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1238 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1239
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001240- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1241
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001242- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1243 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1244 same as when the argument is omitted).
1245 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1246
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001247- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1248
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001249- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1250 schemes are offered.
1251
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001252- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1253
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001254- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1255 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1256 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1257
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001258- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1259
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001260- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1261 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1262
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001263- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1264 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1265 when dummy_threading is being used.
1266
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001267- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1268 from a tarfile.
1269
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001270- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001271 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001272
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001273- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1274 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1275 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1276 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1277
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001278- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1279 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1280
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001281- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1282 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1283 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1284 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1285 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1286 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1287 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1288 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1289 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1290 by some other method in progress).
1291
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001292- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1293 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1294 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001295
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001296- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1297
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001298- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1299 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1300 AM Kuchling.
1301
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001302- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1303 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1304 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1305
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001306- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1307 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1308 instead of unsigned.
1309
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001310- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001311 no longer part of the public API.
1312
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001313- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1314 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1315 string methods of the same name).
1316
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001317- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001318 SF patch 945642.
1319
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001320- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1321
1322 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1323
1324 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1325 DocTestSuites.
1326
1327- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1328 that provide thread-local data.
1329
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001330- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1331 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1332
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001333- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1334
1335- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1336 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1337 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1338
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001339- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1340
1341 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1342 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1343 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001344
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001345 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1346 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1347 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1348 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1349
1350 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1351 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1352
1353 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1354 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1355 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1356 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1357
1358 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1359 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1360 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1361 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1362 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1363
1364 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1365 wrapping help output.
1366
1367 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1368 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1369 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001370
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001371C API
1372-----
1373
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001374- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1375 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1376 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1377 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1378 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1379 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1380 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1381 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1382 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1383 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1384 its visible semantics have not changed.
1385
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001386- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1387 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1388
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001389Documentation
1390-------------
1391
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001392- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001393
1394 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001395 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001396
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001397 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001398
1399 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1400
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001401- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001402
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001403Tests
1404-----
1405
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001406- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001407 platforms that use the Makefile.
1408
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001409- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1410 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1411 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1412
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001413
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001414What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1415=================================
1416
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001417*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001418
1419Core and builtins
1420-----------------
1421
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001422- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1423 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1424 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1425 objects now (one object instead of three).
1426
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001427- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1428 Windows DLLs.
1429
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001430- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1431 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001432
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001433- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1434 a new .pyc magic.
1435
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001436- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1437 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1438 be there.
1439
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001440- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1441 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1442 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1443
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001444- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1445 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1446 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1447
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001448- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1449
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001450- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1451 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1452 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001453
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001454- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1455 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1456
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001457- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1458
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001459- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001460 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001461
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001462- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1463
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001464- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1465
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001466- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1467 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1468
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001469- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1470 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1471 Fixes bug #858016 .
1472
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001473- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1474 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1475 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1476
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001477- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1478 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1479 improves their performance (about 35%).
1480
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001481- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1482 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1483 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1484
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001485- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1486 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1487 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1488 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1489
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001490- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1491 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001492 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001493 length is not known).
1494
1495- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1496 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001497 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1498 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001499 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1500
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001501- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1502 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1503
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001504- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1505 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1506 keyword arguments.
1507
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001508- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1509 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1510 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1511
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001512- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1513 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1514 cases.
1515
1516- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1517 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1518 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1519 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1520 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1521 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1522 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1523 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1524 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1525 a release build.
1526
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001527- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1528 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1529
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001530- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001531 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001532
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001533- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1534 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1535 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1536 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1537 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1538 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1539 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1540 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1541 destroyed.
1542
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001543- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1544 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1545 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1546 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1547 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1548 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1549 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1550 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1551
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001552- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1553 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1554 character other than a space.
1555
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001556- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1557 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1558 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1559 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1560 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1561 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1562 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1563 attributes with the same name.
1564
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001565- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1566 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1567 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1568 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1569 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1570 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1571 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1572 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1573 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1574 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1575 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1576 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1577 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1578 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001579
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001580- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1581 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1582 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1583 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1584 This has been repaired.
1585
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001586- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1587
1588- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1589
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001590- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1591 over a sequence.
1592
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001593- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001594 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001595
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001596- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1597
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001598- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1599 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1600 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1601 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1602 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1603 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1604 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1605 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1606
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001607- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1608 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1609 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1610
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001611- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1612 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1613 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1614 freelist.
1615
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001616- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1617 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1618
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001619- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1620 number.
1621
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001622- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1623 a TypeError exception.
1624
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001625- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1626 820195.
1627
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001628- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1629 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1630 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1631
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001632- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001633 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1634 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001635
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001636- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1637 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1638 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1639
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001640- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1641 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001642 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001643
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001644- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001645 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1646 the first call.
1647
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001648
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001649Extension modules
1650-----------------
1651
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001652- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1653 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1654
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001655- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1656 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1657 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1658 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1659 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1660 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1661 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001662
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001663- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1664
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001665- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1666
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001667- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1668 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1669
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001670- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1671 fewer false positives.
1672
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001673- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1674 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1675
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001676- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001677 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1678
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001679- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001680 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001681 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001682 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1683 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001684
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001685- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1686 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1687 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1688 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1689
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001690- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1691 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1692 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1693 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1694 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1695 #897625.
1696
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001697- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1698 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1699
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001700- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1701 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1702 and pops on either side of the deque.
1703
1704- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1705 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1706
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001707- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1708 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1709 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1710 other functions that expect a function argument.
1711
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001712- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1713
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001714- os.getsid was added.
1715
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001716- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1717 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1718 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1719
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001720- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1721
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001722- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1723
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001724- readline.clear_history was added.
1725
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001726- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1727
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001728- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1729
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001730- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1731
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001732- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1733
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001734- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1735
1736- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1737
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001738- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1739
1740- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1741
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001742- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1743 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1744 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1745
1746- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1747 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1748 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1749 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1750 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1751 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1752 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1753
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001754- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1755 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1756 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1757 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001758
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001759- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001760 iterators from a single iterable.
1761
1762- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1763 of raising a TypeError exception.
1764
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001765- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1766 as parameter.
1767
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001768Library
1769-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001770
Georg Brandlf0de6a12005-08-22 18:02:59 +00001771- Bug #1266283: The new function "lexists" is now in os.path.__all__.
1772
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001773- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1774 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1775 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001776
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001777- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1778 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1779 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001780
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001781- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001782
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001783- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1784 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001785
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001786- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1787 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1788
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001789- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1790
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001791- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001792 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001793
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001794- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001795 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001796
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001797- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1798
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001799- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1800 on cygwin and mingw32.
1801
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001802- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1803
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001804- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1805 module.
1806
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001807- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1808 installation scheme for all platforms.
1809
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001810- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001811 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001812
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001813- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1814 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1815 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1816
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001817- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1818 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1819 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1820
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001821- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1822
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001823- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1824
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001825- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1826 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1827
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001828- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1829 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1830 type pattern with the same value exists.
1831
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001832- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1833 when run from the command prompt).
1834
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001835- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1836 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1837
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001838- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1839 default sort).
1840
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001841- Added global runctx function to profile module
1842
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001843- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1844
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001845- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1846
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001847- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1848
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001849- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001850 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1851 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1852 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1853 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1854 accordingly.
1855
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001856- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1857 decoding standards.
1858
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001859- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1860 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1861 called for all requests.
1862
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001863- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1864 they are passed to the compiler.
1865
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001866- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1867 indent, width and depth.
1868
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001869- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1870 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1871
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001872- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1873 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1874
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001875- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1876
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001877- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1878
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001879- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1880
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001881- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1882 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1883
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001884- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001885 for better performance.
1886
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001887- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001888
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001889- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1890 a string).
1891
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001892- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1893
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001894- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1895
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001896- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1897
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001898- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1899
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001900- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1901 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1902 list of fieldnames.
1903
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001904- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1905 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1906
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001907- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1908
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001909- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1910 empty lists.
1911
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001912- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1913 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1914 and shelves.
1915
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001916- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1917 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1918
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001919- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001920 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1921 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001922
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001923- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1924 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001925 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001926
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001927- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001928 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1929 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1930
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001931- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1932 and removed in Py2.4.
1933
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001934- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1935
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001936- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1937
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001938Tools/Demos
1939-----------
1940
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001941- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1942 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1943
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001944- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1945
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001946- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1947 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1948 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1949 destination in situations where both files are given.
1950
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001951- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1952 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1953 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1954 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1955
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001956- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1957
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001958- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1959 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1960 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1961 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1962 now.
1963
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001964- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1965 in effect
1966
1967- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1968 C-c C-h
1969
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001970- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1971 -d option was given.
1972
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001973Build
1974-----
1975
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001976- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1977 build under OS X.
1978
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001979- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1980 --enable-profiling.
1981
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001982- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1983 is configured --with-tsc.
1984
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001985- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1986 on AMD64.
1987
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001988- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1989 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1990
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001991- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1992 removed.
1993
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001994- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1995 supported (see PEP 11).
1996
1997- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1998
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001999- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
2000
2001- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
2002 (see PEP 11).
2003
2004- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
2005 sizeof(char) must be 1.
2006
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002007C API
2008-----
2009
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00002010- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
2011 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
2012 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
2013
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00002014- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
2015 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
2016 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
2017 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
2018
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00002019- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
2020 generator objects.
2021
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002022- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
2023 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00002024 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
2025 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002026
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00002027- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
2028 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
2029
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00002030- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
2031 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
2032 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
2033 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
2034 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
2035
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00002036- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
2037 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
2038 about 10% faster.
2039
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00002040- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
2041 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
2042
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00002043- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
2044 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
2045 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
2046 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
2047
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002048Windows
2049-------
2050
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00002051- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
2052 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
2053 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
2054 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
2055
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00002056- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
2057 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
2058 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
2059
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002060
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002061What's New in Python 2.3 final?
2062===============================
2063
2064*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
2065
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002066IDLE
2067----
2068
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00002069- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
2070 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
2071 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
2072 context-menu actions.
2073
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002074- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
2075 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
2076 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
2077 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
2078 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
2079 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
2080 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
2081 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
2082 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
2083
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002084
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002085What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
2086=============================================
2087
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00002088*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002089
2090Core and builtins
2091-----------------
2092
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002093- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002094 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002095 comment at the end are still unsupported.
2096
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002097Extension modules
2098-----------------
2099
2100- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
2101 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
2102 than once. This has been fixed.
2103
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002104- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2105 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2106 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2107 call.
2108
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002109- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2110
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002111Library
2112-------
2113
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002114- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2115 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2116
2117- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2118 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2119 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2120 restored.
2121
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002122IDLE
2123----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002124
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002125- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002126
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002127Build
2128-----
2129
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002130- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2131 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2132
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002133C API
2134-----
2135
2136Windows
2137-------
2138
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002139- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2140 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2141
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002142- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2143
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002144Mac
2145---
2146
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002147- Various fixes to pimp.
2148
2149- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2150
2151- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2152 more problems than it solves.
2153
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002154
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002155What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2156=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002157
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002158*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2159
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002160Core and builtins
2161-----------------
2162
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002163- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2164 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2165
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002166- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2167 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002168 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002169
2170- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2171 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2172 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002173 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002174
2175- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2176 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002177
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002178- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2179 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2180 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2181
2182- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002183 770247.
2184
2185- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002186
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002187Extension modules
2188-----------------
2189
2190- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2191 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2192
2193- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2194
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002195- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2196
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002197- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2198 contained within the _strptime module.
2199
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002200- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2201 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2202
2203- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002204 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2205
2206- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2207 the find_class attribute, if present.
2208
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002209- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002210
2211 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2212 (SF bug 763298).
2213
2214 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002215 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2216 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2217 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002218
2219 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2220
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002221Library
2222-------
2223
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002224- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2225
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002226- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2227 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2228 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2229 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2230 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2231 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2232 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2233 or Tester().
2234
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002235- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2236 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2237 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2238 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2239 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2240 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2241 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2242 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2243 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002244
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002245 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002246
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002247- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2248 weren't before was an oversight.
2249
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002250- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2251 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2252
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002253- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2254 when there are no lines.
2255
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002256- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2257 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2258
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002259- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2260 to child processes.
2261
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002262- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2263
2264- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2265
2266- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2267 xmlrpclib.
2268
2269- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2270 responses.
2271
2272- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2273 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2274
2275- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2276 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2277 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2278
2279- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2280 used as patterns.
2281
2282- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2283 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2284 than Tk 8.3.
2285
2286- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2287
2288- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002289
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002290Tools/Demos
2291-----------
2292
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002293- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2294
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002295- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2296
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002297- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002298
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002299Build
2300-----
2301
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002302- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2303
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002304- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2305
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002306- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2307 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002308
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002309- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2310 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2311 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002312
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002313C API
2314-----
2315
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002316- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2317 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2318
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002319Windows
2320-------
2321
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002322- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2323 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2324 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2325 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2326 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2327 Python exception ::
2328
2329 thread.error: can't start new thread
2330
2331 is raised now.
2332
2333- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2334 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2335 instead of from DLL teardown.
2336
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002337Mac
2338---
2339
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002340- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002341 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002342 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2343 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2344 the executable in the bundle.
2345
2346- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002347
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002348- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2349
2350- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2351 on Panther.
2352
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002353What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2354================================
2355
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002356*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002357
2358Core and builtins
2359-----------------
2360
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002361- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2362 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2363 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2364 with the -i option.
2365
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002366- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2367 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2368
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002369- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2370 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2371
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002372- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2373 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2374 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2375 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2376 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2377 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2378 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2379 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2380 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2381 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2382 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2383 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2384 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002385
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002386- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2387 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2388 embedded in a lambda expression.
2389
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002390- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2391 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2392 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2393 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2394 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2395
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002396- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2397 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2398 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2399
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002400- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2401 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2402
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002403- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2404 It's writable again.
2405
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002406- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2407 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2408 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002409 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002410
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002411- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2412 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2413 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2414
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002415Extension modules
2416-----------------
2417
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002418- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2419 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2420
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002421- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2422 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2423 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2424 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2425
2426- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2427 collection.
2428
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002429- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2430 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2431 unique within a single program run.
2432
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002433- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2434 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2435
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002436- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2437 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2438
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002439- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2440 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002441
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002442- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2443
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002444- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2445 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2446
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002447- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2448 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2449 for many BSD-derived systems.
2450
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002451
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002452Library
2453-------
2454
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002455- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2456 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2457 primary ones:
2458
2459 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2460 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2461 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2462
2463 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2464 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2465 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2466 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2467 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2468 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2469
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002470- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2471 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2472 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2473 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2474 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2475 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2476 argument.
2477
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002478- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2479 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2480 in the archive.
2481
2482- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2483 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2484
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002485- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2486 569574).
2487
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002488- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2489 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2490 no more.
2491
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002492- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2493 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2494 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2495 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2496 code coverage.
2497
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002498- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2499 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2500 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002501 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2502 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002503
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002504- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2505 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2506 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002507 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002508
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002509- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2510
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002511- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2512 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2513 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2514 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2515
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002516- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2517 handling.
2518
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002519- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2520 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2521
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002522- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2523 in socket.py.
2524
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002525- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2526
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002527- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2528 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2529 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2530 opener with proxy support.
2531
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002532- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2533
2534- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2535
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002536Tools/Demos
2537-----------
2538
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002539- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2540
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002541- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2542
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002543- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2544 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002545
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002546- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2547 files.
2548
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002549Build
2550-----
2551
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002552- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002553 different root directory.
2554
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002555C API
2556-----
2557
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002558- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2559 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2560 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2561 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2562 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2563 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2564 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2565 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2566 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2567 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2568
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002569- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2570 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2571 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2572 from Python.
2573
2574
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002575New platforms
2576-------------
2577
2578None this time.
2579
2580Tests
2581-----
2582
2583- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2584 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2585
2586Windows
2587-------
2588
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002589- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2590
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002591- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2592 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2593 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2594 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2595 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2596 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2597 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2598 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2599 that's what it's for.
2600
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002601Mac
2602---
2603
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002604- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2605 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2606 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2607 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002608- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2609 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2610- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002611
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002612SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2613------------------------------------
2614
2615430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2616598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2617622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2618661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2619683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2620697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2621713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2622724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2623727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2624729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2625730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2626731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2627732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2628733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2629735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2630740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2631744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2632745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2633747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2634749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2635751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2636753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2637755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2638757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2639760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2640
2641
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002642What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2643================================
2644
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002645*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002646
2647Core and builtins
2648-----------------
2649
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002650- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2651 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2652
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002653- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2654 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2655 and cannot be strings).
2656
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002657- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2658 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2659 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2660 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2661
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002662- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2663 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2664 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2665 Python itself.
2666
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002667- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2668 the referenced object, if it has one.
2669
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002670- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2671 the thread started at
2672 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2673
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002674- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2675 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2676 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2677 placed on a list index.
2678
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002679- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2680 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2681 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2682 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2683
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002684- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2685 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2686 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2687 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2688 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2689 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2690 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2691
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002692- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2693 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2694 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2695 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2696 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2697
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002698- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2699 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002700
2701- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2702 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2703 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2704 #693195.)
2705
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002706- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2707 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002708
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002709- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002710 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002711 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2712 interpreter executions, would fail.
2713
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002714- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002715 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002716 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002717
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002718Extension modules
2719-----------------
2720
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002721- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2722 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2723 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2724 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2725
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002726- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2727 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2728
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002729- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2730 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2731 and Greg Chapman.)
2732
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002733- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2734 recursively.
2735
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002736- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002737 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2738 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2739 leaks.
2740
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002741- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2742
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002743- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2744 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2745 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2746 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2747 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2748 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2749 #705836.
2750
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002751- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002752 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2753
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002754- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2755 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2756 See SF bug #692416.
2757
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002758- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2759 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2760
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002761- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2762 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2763 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002764
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002765- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002766 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2767 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2768
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002769- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2770 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2771 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2772 timeouts to work properly.
2773
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002774Library
2775-------
2776
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002777- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2778 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2779 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2780 future release.
2781
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002782- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2783 for querying platform dependent features.
2784
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002785- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002786
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002787- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2788 pickle protocol versions.
2789
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002790- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2791 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2792 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2793
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002794- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2795
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002796- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2797 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2798 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2799 modules.
2800
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002801- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2802 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2803 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2804
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002805- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2806 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2807
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002808- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2809 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2810 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2811
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002812- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002813 MS Office extensions.
2814
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002815- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2816 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2817
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002818- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2819 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2820
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002821- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2822 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2823 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2824 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2825 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2826 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2827
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002828- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2829 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2830 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002831
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002832- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2833 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2834 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2835
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002836- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2837
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002838- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2839 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2840 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2841
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002842Tools/Demos
2843-----------
2844
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002845- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2846 See the module docstring for details.
2847
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002848Build
2849-----
2850
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002851- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2852 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002853
2854C API
2855-----
2856
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002857- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2858
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002859- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2860 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2861 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2862
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002863- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2864 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002865
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002866 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2867 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2868 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002869
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002870- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002871 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2872
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002873- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2874 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2875 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002876
2877New platforms
2878-------------
2879
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002880None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002881
2882Tests
2883-----
2884
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002885- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2886 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002887
2888Windows
2889-------
2890
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002891- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2892 function.
2893
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002894- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2895 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002896
2897Mac
2898---
2899
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002900- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2901 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002902
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002903- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2904 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002905
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002906- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2907 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2908 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002909
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002910- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002911 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2912 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002913
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002914- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2915 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002916
2917
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002918What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2919=================================
2920
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002921*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002922
2923Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002924-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002925
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002926- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2927 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2928 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2929
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002930- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2931 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2932 (SF patch #664376.)
2933
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002934- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2935 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2936 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2937 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2938 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2939 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002940 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002941
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002942- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2943 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2944 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2945 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002946 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002947
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002948- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2949 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2950 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2951 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2952 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2953 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2954 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2955 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2956 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2957 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2958 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2959
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002960- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2961 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2962 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2963 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2964 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2965 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2966
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002967- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2968 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2969
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002970- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2971 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2972 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2973 case.)
2974
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002975- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2976 passed as unicode strings.
2977
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002978- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2979 See SF bug #683467.
2980
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002981- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2982 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2983
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002984- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2985
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002986- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2987
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002988- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2989 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2990 arguments.
2991
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002992- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2993 See SF bug #667147.
2994
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002995- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002996 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002997 See SF bug #676155.
2998
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002999- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003000 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003001 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
3002 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
3003 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
3004 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
3005 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
3006 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003007
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003008Extension modules
3009-----------------
3010
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003011- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
3012 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3013 tp_as_number pointer.
3014
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003015- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
3016 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
3017 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
3018 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
3019 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
3020
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003021- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
3022
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00003023- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
3024
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003025- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00003026 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003027 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
3028 patch #678531.)
3029
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00003030- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
3031 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
3032
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00003033- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
3034 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
3035
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00003036- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
3037
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00003038- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
3039 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
3040 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
3041
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003042- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
3043
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003044- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
3045 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
3046
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003047- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003048
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003049- datetime changes:
3050
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00003051 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
3052
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003053 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
3054 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
3055 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
3056 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
3057 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
3058 now.
3059
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003060 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003061 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
3062 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003063
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003064 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003065 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003066 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
3067 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
3068 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
3069 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003070
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003071 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
3072 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
3073 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003074 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
3075
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003076 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
3077 by a later example coded by Guido.
3078
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003079 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003080 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
3081 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
3082 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003083 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
3084 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
3085
3086 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
3087 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
3088 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
3089 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
3090 tzinfo subclass instance.
3091
3092 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
3093 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
3094 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
3095 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
3096 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
3097 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
3098 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
3099 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003100
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003101 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
3102 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3103 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3104 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3105 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003106 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3107
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003108 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003109
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003110 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3111 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3112 as a naive datetime object.
3113
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003114 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3115 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3116 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3117
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003118 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3119 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3120 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3121 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3122 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3123 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3124 comparison.
3125
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003126 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3127 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3128 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3129 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003130 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003131
3132 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003133
3134 and ::
3135
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003136 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3137
3138 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3139 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3140 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3141 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3142
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003143 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3144 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3145 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3146 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3147 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3148
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003149 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3150 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003151 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3152 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003153
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003154Library
3155-------
3156
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003157- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3158 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3159
3160- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3161 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3162 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3163 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3164 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3165 See PEP 307 for details.
3166
3167- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3168 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3169
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003170- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3171 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003172 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003173 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3174 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003175 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003176
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003177- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3178 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3179
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003180- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3181 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3182 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3183
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003184- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3185
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003186- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3187 exception.
3188
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003189- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3190 class.
3191
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003192- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3193 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3194 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3195
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003196- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3197 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3198
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003199- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003200 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3201 See SF bug #659228.
3202
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003203- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3204 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3205 See SF patch #651082.
3206
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003207- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003208
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003209- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3210 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3211
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003212- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003213 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003214
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003215- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3216 DOS paths from other platforms.
3217
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003218Tools/Demos
3219-----------
3220
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003221- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3222 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3223 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3224 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3225 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3226 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3227 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3228 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3229 example:
3230
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003231 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3232 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003233
3234 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3235
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003236
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003237Build
3238-----
3239
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003240- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3241 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3242 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003243 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3244
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003245 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3246
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003247- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3248 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3249 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3250 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3251 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3252 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3253 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3254 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3255 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3256
3257- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3258 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3259 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3260 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3261
3262- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3263 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3264
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003265C API
3266-----
3267
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003268- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3269 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003270
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003271- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3272 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3273 tp_as_number pointer.
3274
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003275- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3276 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3277 (SF #681367)
3278
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003279- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3280 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3281 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3282 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003283
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003284Tests
3285-----
3286
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003287- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003288 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3289 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3290 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3291 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3292 pydoc.)
3293
3294- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3295
3296- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003297
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003298Windows
3299-------
3300
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003301- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3302 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3303 time).
3304
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003305- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3306 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3307
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003308- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3309 release without strong cryptography.
3310
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003311- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003312 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003313
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003314- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3315 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3316
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003317Mac
3318---
3319
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003320- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3321 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003322
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003323- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3324 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3325 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003326
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003327- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3328 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003329
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003330- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3331 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3332 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3333 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003334
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003335- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003336 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3337 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3338 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003339
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003340
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003341What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003342=================================
3343
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003344*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003345
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003346Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003347--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003348
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003349- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3350
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003351- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3352 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003353 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003354 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003355 a different meaning than before.
3356
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003357- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003358 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003359 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003360
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003361- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003362 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003363 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003364
3365- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3366 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3367 and deallocation.
3368
3369- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3370 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3371
3372- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3373 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3374 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3375 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3376 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3377
3378- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3379 now detected by the garbage collector.
3380
3381- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3382 [SF bug 519621]
3383
3384- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3385 identifier.
3386
3387- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3388 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3389 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3390 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3391 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3392 [SF bug 563060]
3393
3394- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3395 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3396 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3397 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3398 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3399
3400- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3401 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3402 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3403
3404- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3405
3406- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3407 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3408 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3409 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3410 state of the slots would be lost.)
3411
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003412Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003413-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003414
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003415- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003416 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3417 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3418 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3419 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003420 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3421 Jython 2.1.
3422
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003423- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003424 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003425 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3426 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3427 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3428 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3429 these, see PEP 302.
3430
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003431- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3432 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3433 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3434
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003435- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3436 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3437 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3438
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003439- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3440 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3441 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3442
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003443- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3444 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3445 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3446 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3447 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3448 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3449 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3450 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3451 releases or implementations.
3452
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003453- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003454 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3455 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003456
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003457- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3458 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3459
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003460- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3461 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3462 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3463
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003464- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3465 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3466
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003467- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3468 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003469 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3470 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003471
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003472- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3473 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3474 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3475 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3476 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3477
3478 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3479 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3480 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3481 pattern.
3482
3483 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3484 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3485 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3486 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3487
3488 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3489 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3490 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3491 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3492 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3493 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3494
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003495- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3496 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3497 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3498 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3499 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3500 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3501 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3502 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003503
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003504- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3505 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3506 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3507 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3508 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003509 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3510 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3511 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3512 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3513 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3514 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3515 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003516
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003517- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3518 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3519
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003520- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3521 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3522 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3523 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3524 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3525 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3526 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3527 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3528 to Zack Weinberg!
3529
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003530- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3531 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3532 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3533 type. This has been fixed now.
3534
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003535- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3536 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3537 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3538
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003539- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3540 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3541 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3542 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3543 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3544 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3545 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3546 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003547 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003548
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003549- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3550 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3551 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003552
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003553- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3554 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3555 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3556 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3557 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3558 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3559 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3560 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003561 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003562 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3563 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3564
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003565- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3566 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3567 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3568 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3569 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3570 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3571 this.)
3572
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003573- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3574 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003575 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003576 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003577 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3578 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003579 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3580 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003581
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003582- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3583 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3584 currently running.
3585
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003586- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3587 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3588 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3589 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3590
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003591- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3592 as directory names.
3593
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003594- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3595 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3596
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003597- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3598 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3599
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003600- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003601 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3602 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003603
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003604- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3605 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3606 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3607 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3608 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3609
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003610- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3611 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3612 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3613 removed.
3614
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003615- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3616 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3617 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3618
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003619- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3620 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3621 to __debug__.
3622
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003623- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3624 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3625 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3626
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003627- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3628 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3629 deprecated now.
3630
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003631- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3632 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3633 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003634
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003635- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3636 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3637 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3638 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3639 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003640
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003641- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3642 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3643
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003644- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3645 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3646 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003647 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003648 is backward compatible.
3649
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003650- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3651 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3652 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3653 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3654 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3655
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003656- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3657 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3658 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3659 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3660 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3661 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003662
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003663- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3664 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3665
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003666- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3667 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3668
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003669- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3670 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3671 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3672 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3673 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3674
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003675- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3676 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3677 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3678
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003679- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003680 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3681
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003682- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3683 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3684 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003685
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003686- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3687 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3688
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003689- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3690 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3691 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3692
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003693- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3694
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003695Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003696-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003697
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003698- Added three operators to the operator module:
3699 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3700 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3701 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3702
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003703- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3704
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003705- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3706 archives.
3707
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003708- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3709 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3710 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3711
3712 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3713
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003714- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3715 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3716 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003717 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003718
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003719- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3720 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3721 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3722 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003723 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3724 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3725 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3726 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003727
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003728- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3729 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003730
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003731- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3732
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003733- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3734 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3735
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003736- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3737 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3738 supported.
3739
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003740- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3741
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003742- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3743 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003744
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003745- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3746 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3747
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003748- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3749
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003750- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3751 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3752
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003753- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3754 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3755 functions but callable type objects.
3756
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003757- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003758 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003759 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003760
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003761- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3762 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003763
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003764- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3765 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003766
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003767- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3768 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3769 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3770 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3771
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003772- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3773 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003774
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003775- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3776 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3777 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3778 and __imul__.
3779
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003780- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003781 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3782 is called.
3783
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003784- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3785 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3786 interpreter was compiled.
3787
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003788- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3789 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3790 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003791 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003792 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3793 1, not 2.
3794
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003795- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3796 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3797 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3798 limit.
3799
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003800- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3801 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3802 bug #623464.
3803
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003804- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3805 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3806 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3807 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3808
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003809Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003810-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003811
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003812- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3813
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003814- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3815 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3816 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3817 with Python 2.3a2.
3818
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003819- os.path exposes getctime.
3820
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003821- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003822 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003823 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003824 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003825 unit tests of floating point results.
3826
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003827- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3828 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3829 has been increased.
3830
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003831- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3832 executed.
3833
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003834- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3835 postinstallation script.
3836
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003837- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3838 test the current module.
3839
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003840- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003841 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3842 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3843 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3844 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3845
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003846- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003847 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003848 Ward's Optik package.
3849
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003850- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3851 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3852 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3853 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3854
3855- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3856 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003857 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003858
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003859- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3860 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3861 shelf are binary pickles.
3862
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003863- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3864 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3865
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003866- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3867 modules are iterators now.
3868
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003869- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3870 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3871 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3872 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3873 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3874 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003875
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003876- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3877 with their entity value.
3878
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003879- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3880
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003881- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3882 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003883
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003884- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3885 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003886 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003887
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003888- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3889 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3890 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3891 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3892 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3893 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3894 main():
3895
3896 import locale
3897 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3898
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003899- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3900 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3901
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003902- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3903 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3904 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3905 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3906 to the new standard.
3907
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003908- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3909 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3910 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3911 an extension to the database.
3912
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003913- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3914 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3915 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3916 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003917 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003918
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003919- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003920 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003921
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003922- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3923 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3924 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3925 bounded integers.
3926
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003927- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3928 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3929 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3930 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3931 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3932 in existence.
3933
3934 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3935 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3936 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3937 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3938 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3939 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3940
3941 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3942 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3943 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3944 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3945
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003946- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3947 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3948 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3949
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003950- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3951
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003952- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3953 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3954 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3955 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3956
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003957- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3958 argument.
3959
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003960- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3961 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3962 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3963 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3964 [SF patch 560794].
3965
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003966- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3967 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3968 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003969 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3970 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3971 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003972
3973- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3974 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003975
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003976- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3977 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3978 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3979 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003980
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003981- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3982 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3983 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3984 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3985 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3986
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003987- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003988
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003989- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3990
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003991- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3992 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3993 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3994 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3995 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3996 identical to None.
3997
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003998- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3999 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
4000 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
4001 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
4002 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
4003 results now.
4004
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00004005- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
4006 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
4007
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004008- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
4009 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
4010 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
4011 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
4012 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
4013 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
4014 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
4015 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
4016
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00004017- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
4018
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00004019- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
4020 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
4021
4022- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
4023 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
4024 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
4025 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
4026 and other systems.
4027
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004028- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
4029 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
4030 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
4031 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 +00004032 work well with these.
4033
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00004034- compileall now supports quiet operation.
4035
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004036- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00004037 connections.
4038
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00004039- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
4040 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
4041 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
4042
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00004043- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
4044 sets
4045
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00004046- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
4047 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
4048 name.
4049
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00004050- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
4051 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
4052 passed in.
4053
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004054- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00004055 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00004056 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
4057 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00004058
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00004059- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
4060
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00004061- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
4062
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00004063- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
4064 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
4065 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
4066
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004067- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
4068 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
4069 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
4070 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00004071 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004072
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004073- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004074 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004075 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004076
4077- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
4078 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
4079 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
4080
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004081- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00004082 the value of its expression argument.
4083
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004084- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
4085 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
4086 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
4087
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00004088- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
4089 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
4090 skipstone browser was included.
4091
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00004092- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
4093 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
4094
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004095Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004096-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004097
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00004098- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
4099 names in addition to accepting file names.
4100
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00004101- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
4102 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4103 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4104 still used and useful.)
4105
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004106- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4107 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4108 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4109 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004110
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004111- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4112 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4113 the generated binary.
4114
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004115Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004116-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004117
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004118- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4119
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004120- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4121 except in the hands of experts.
4122
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004123- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004124 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4125 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4126 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004127
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004128- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4129 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4130 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4131 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4132 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4133 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4134 builds.
4135
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004136- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4137 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4138 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4139 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4140 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4141 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4142 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4143 new type.
4144
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004145- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004146
4147 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4148 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4149 positive infinities.
4150
4151 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4152 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4153 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4154 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4155 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4156 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4157 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4158
4159 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4160
4161 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4162
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004163- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4164 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4165 size of the executable.
4166
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004167- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4168 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4169 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4170 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004171
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004172- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4173
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004174- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4175 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4176 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004177
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004178- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4179 well as Unix.
4180
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004181- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4182 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4183 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4184 modules in the README file for details.
4185
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004186C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004187-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004188
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004189- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4190 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004191 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004192 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004193 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004194
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004195- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4196 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4197 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4198 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4199 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4200 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004201 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004202 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4203 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4204 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4205 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4206 aligned.)
4207
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004208- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4209 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4210 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4211
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004212- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4213 level.
4214
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004215- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4216 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4217 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4218 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4219 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4220
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004221- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4222 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4223 code.
4224
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004225- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4226 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4227 adjusting for negative indices.
4228
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004229- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4230 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4231 object.
4232
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004233- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4234 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4235 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4236
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004237- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4238 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004239
4240- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4241
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004242- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4243 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4244 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4245 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4246
4247- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4248
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004249- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004250
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004251- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004252 without going through the buffer API.
4253
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004254- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004255
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004256- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4257 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4258 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4259 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4260
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004261- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4262 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4263
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004264- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004265 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4266
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004267New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004268-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004269
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004270- OpenVMS is now supported.
4271
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004272- AtheOS is now supported.
4273
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004274- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4275
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004276- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4277
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004278Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004279-----
4280
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004281- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4282 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4283 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004284
4285Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004286-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004287
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004288- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4289 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4290 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4291 bugs.
4292 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004293 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004294 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4295 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004296 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004297
4298- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004299 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004300
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004301- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4302 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4303
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004304- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4305 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004306 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004307 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4308
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004309- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4310 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4311 use files" uninstall option).
4312
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004313- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4314
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004315- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4316 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4317
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004318- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4319 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4320 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4321
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004322- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4323 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4324 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4325 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4326 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004327 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4328 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4329 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004330
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004331- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004332 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004333 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4334 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4335 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4336 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4337 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4338 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4339 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4340 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4341 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4342 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4343 work around.
4344
4345- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4346 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4347 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4348 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4349 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4350 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4351 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4352 specified with O_CREAT too).
4353
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004354Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004355----
4356
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004357- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004358
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004359- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4360 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4361 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4362
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004363- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4364 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4365 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4366
4367- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4368 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4369 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4370 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4371 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4372 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4373 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4374 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004375
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004376- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4377 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4378 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004379
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004380- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4381 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4382 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4383 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4384 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004385
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004386- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4387 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4388 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004389
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004390- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4391 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004392
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004393- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4394 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4395 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4396 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4397 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004398
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004399- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4400 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4401 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4402
4403- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4404 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4405 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004406
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004407- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4408 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4409 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4410 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004411 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004412
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004413- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4414 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004415
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004416- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4417 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004418
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004419- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004420 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004421 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4422 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004423
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004424
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004425What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004426===============================
4427
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004428*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4429
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004430Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004431--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004432
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004433- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4434 with a custom metaclass.
4435
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004436Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004437-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004438
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004439- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4440 are proxies.
4441
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004442Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004443-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004444
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004445- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4446 very short strings.
4447
4448- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4449 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4450 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4451 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4452 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4453
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004454Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004455-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004456
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004457- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4458 close or delete time).
4459
4460- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4461 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4462
4463- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4464
4465- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004466 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004467
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004468Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004469-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004470
4471Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004472-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004473
4474C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004475-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004476
4477New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004478-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004479
4480Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004481-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004482
4483Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004484-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004485
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004486- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4487
4488- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4489 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4490
4491- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4492 deleted at process exit time.
4493
4494- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4495 in backslash.
4496
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004497Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004498----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004499
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004500- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4501 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4502 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4503
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004504
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004505What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004506===========================
4507
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004508*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4509
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004510Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004511--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004512
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004513- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4514 been extensively updated. See
4515
4516 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4517
4518 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4519
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004520- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4521 deleted!
4522
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004523- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4524 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4525 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4526 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4527 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4528
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004529- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4530
4531 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4532 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4533
4534 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4535 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4536 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4537 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4538 supported anyway.
4539
4540 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4541 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4542
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004543- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4544 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4545 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4546 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4547 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004548
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004549- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4550 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4551 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4552
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004553Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004554-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004555
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004556- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4557 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4558 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4559 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4560 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4561 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004562 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4563 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4564 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4565 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004566
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004567- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4568 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4569 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4570
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004571Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004572-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004573
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004574- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4575
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004576Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004577-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004578
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004579- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4580 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4581 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4582 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4583 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4584 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4585
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004586- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4587
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004588- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4589
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004590- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4591
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004592- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4593 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4594 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4595
4596- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4597
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004598Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004599-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004600
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004601- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4602 off a search on Google.
4603
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004604Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004605-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004606
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004607- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4608 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4609 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4610 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4611 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4612 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4613 other platforms should do likewise.
4614
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004615- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4616 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4617 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4618
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004619C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004620-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004621
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004622- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4623 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4624 producing key-value pairs.
4625
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004626- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004627 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004628 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4629 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4630 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4631 previously went unchallenged.
4632
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004633New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004634-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004635
4636Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004637-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004638
4639Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004640-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004641
4642Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004643----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004644
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004645- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4646 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004647
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004648- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4649 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4650 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4651 home.
4652
4653
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004654What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004655===========================
4656
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004657*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4658
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004659Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004660--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004661
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004662- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4663 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004664
4665 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004666 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004667
4668 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4669 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004670 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004671 This needs to be documented.
4672
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004673- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4674 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4675
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004676- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4677 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4678 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4679
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004680- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4681 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4682
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004683- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4684 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4685 class forbids it).
4686
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004687- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4688 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4689 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4690
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004691- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4692
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004693Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004694-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004695
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004696- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4697 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004698 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004699
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004700- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4701 (like 1 + '').
4702
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004703Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004704-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004705
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004706- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4707 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4708 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4709 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004710 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004711 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4712
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004713- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4714 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4715 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4716 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4717
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004718- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4719 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004720 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4721 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4722 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004723
4724- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4725 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004726
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004727- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4728 bytes on its input.
4729
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004730Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004731-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004732
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004733- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004734 convenience function.
4735
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004736- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4737 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4738 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004739 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4740 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4741 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4742 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4743 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4744 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004745
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004746- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4747 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4748 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4749 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4750
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004751- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4752 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4753 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4754
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004755- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4756 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4757 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4758 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4759
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004760- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4761 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004762 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004763 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4764 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4765 new -l and -e options.
4766
4767- statcache is now deprecated.
4768
4769- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4770 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004771 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004772 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4773 time properly taken into account.
4774
4775- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4776 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4777 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4778 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4779
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004780Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004781-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004782
4783Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004784-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004785
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004786- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4787 is built with libdb3 if available.
4788
4789- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4790
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004791C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004792-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004793
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004794- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4795 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4796 PySequence_Size().
4797
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004798- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4799
4800- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4801 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4802 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4803
4804- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4805 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4806
4807- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4808 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4809
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004810New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004811-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004812
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004813- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4814 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4815
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004816- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4817 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4818
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004819- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4820
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004821Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004822-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004823
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004824- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4825 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4826
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004827Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004828-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004829
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004830Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004831----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004832
4833- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4834 removed completely in the next release.
4835
4836- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4837 OSX.
4838
4839- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4840 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4841
4842- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4843
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004844
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004845What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004846===========================
4847
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004848*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4849
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004850Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004851--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004852
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004853- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004854 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004855 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004856 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4857 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004858 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4859 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004860 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4861 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004862
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004863- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4864 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4865
4866- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4867 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4868
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004869Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004870-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004871
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004872- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4873 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4874 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4875 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4876 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4877 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4878 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4879 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4880
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004881- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4882 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4883 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4884 example).
4885
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004886- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004887 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004888 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004889 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004890
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004891- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4892 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4893 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004894 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004895
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004896- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4897 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4898 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4899 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4900 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4901 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4902
4903 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4904
4905 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4906
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004907Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004908-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004909
4910- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4911
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004912- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4913
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004914- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4915 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004916
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004917- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4918 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4919 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4920 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4921 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4922 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004923 attributes.
4924
4925- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4926 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4927 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004928
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004929- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4930 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4931 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004932
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004933- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4934 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4935 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004936 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4937 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4938
4939- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4940 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004941
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004942Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004943-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004944
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004945- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4946 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4947
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004948- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4949 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4950 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4951 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4952
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004953- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4954 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4955 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4956 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4957
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004958 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4959 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4960 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4961 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4962 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4963 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4964 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4965 without losing information).
4966
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004967- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004968 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4969 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4970 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4971 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4972 module).
4973
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004974 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004975 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4976 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4977 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4978 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004979
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004980- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004981 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4982 encoding.
4983
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004984- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4985 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4986
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004987- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004988 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4989
4990- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4991 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4992 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4993 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4994
4995- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4996
4997- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4998 ON, and OFF.
4999
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005000- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
5001 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
5002
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005003Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005004-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005005
5006- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
5007 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
5008 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005009
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005010- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
5011 been added: -X and -E.
5012
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005013Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005014-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005015
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005016- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
5017 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
5018
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005019C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005020-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005021
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00005022- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
5023 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
5024 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
5025 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
5026 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
5027
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00005028- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
5029 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
5030 as long) arguments.
5031
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005032- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
5033 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
5034 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
5035 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
5036 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
5037 report any bugs or strange behavior).
5038
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005039- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
5040 input.
5041
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005042New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005043-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005044
5045Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005046-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005047
5048Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005049-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005050
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00005051- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
5052 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
5053 is created for .py and .pyw files.
5054
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005055- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
5056 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
5057 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005058 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005059
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005060 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
5061 # (SIGINT) behavior.
5062 import signal
5063 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005064
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005065 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005066 while 1:
5067 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005068 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005069 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
5070 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
5071 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
5072 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005073
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005074
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005075What's New in Python 2.2a4?
5076===========================
5077
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005078*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
5079
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005080Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005081--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005082
5083- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
5084 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
5085 documentation for all operations on list objects.
5086
5087- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
5088 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
5089 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
5090 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
5091 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
5092 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
5093 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005094
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005095- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005096 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005097 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
5098 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
5099 associate a docstring with a property.
5100
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005101- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
5102 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5103 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5104 other built-in object types.
5105
5106- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5107 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5108 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5109 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5110 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5111
5112- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5113 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5114
5115- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5116 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005117 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005118 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5119 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5120 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5121 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5122 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5123
5124- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5125 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5126 class.
5127
5128- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5129 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5130 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5131 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5132
5133- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5134 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5135 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5136 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5137
5138- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5139 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5140
5141- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5142 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5143 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5144 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5145 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005146 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005147 with the same value as s.
5148
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005149- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5150
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005151Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005152----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005153
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005154- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5155
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005156- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5157 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5158 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5159 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5160 objects.
5161
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005162- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5163 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005164 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5165 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5166
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005167- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5168 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5169 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5170
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005171Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005172-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005173
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005174- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5175 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5176 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5177 by the instances.
5178
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005179- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5180 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5181 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5182
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005183- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5184 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5185 before the entire comparison is complete.
5186
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005187- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5188 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5189 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5190
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005191- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5192 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5193 getwriter().
5194
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005195- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5196 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5197
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005198- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005199 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5200 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5201
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005202- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5203 iterable object.
5204
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005205- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5206 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005207
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005208- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5209 authentication.
5210
5211- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5212 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005213
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005214- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005215 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5216 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5217 a sample driver.)
5218
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005219Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005220-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005221
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005222- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5223 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5224 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5225 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5226 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5227 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5228 kernel has large file support.
5229
5230- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5231 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5232 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5233 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5234 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5235
5236- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5237 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5238 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5239
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005240C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005241-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005242
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005243- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5244 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5245
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005246New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005247-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005248
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005249- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5250 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5251
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005252Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005253-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005254
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005255- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5256 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5257 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5258 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5259 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5260
5261- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5262 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5263 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5264 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5265
5266- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5267 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5268
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005269Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005270-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005271
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005272- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005273 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5274 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005275
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005276
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005277What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5278===========================
5279
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005280*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5281
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005282Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005283----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005284
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005285- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5286 big to represent as a C double.
5287
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005288- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5289 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5290 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5291 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5292 restriction).
5293
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005294- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5295 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5296 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5297 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5298 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5299
5300 >>> dir([])
5301 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5302 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5303 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5304 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5305 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5306 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5307 'reverse', 'sort']
5308
5309 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5310
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005311- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005312 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5313 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5314 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5315 OverflowError exception.
5316
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005317- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005318 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005319 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5320 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5321 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5322 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5323 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005324 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005325 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5326 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5327
5328 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5329 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5330 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5331 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005332
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005333- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005334 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5335 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5336 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5337 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5338 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5339 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5340 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5341 once it is created.
5342
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005343- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5344 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5345 (key, value) pairs.
5346
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005347- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005348 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5349 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5350
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005351- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5352 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5353 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5354 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5355 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005356
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005357- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005358 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5359 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5360
5361 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5362
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005363- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005364 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5365
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005366Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005367-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005368
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005369- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005370 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5371 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005372
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005373- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5374 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5375 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5376 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5377 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5378 in this area anymore).
5379
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005380- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5381 threading.Timer.
5382
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005383- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5384 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5385
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005386- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005387 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5388
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005389- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005390 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5391 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5392 converted to Python longs.
5393
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005394- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005395 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5396
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005397- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5398 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5399 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5400
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005401Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005402-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005403
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005404- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5405 division operators as per PEP 238.
5406
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005407Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005408-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005409
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005410- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5411 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5412 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5413 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5414
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005415C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005416-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005417
5418- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005419
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005420- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5421 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005422 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005423
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005424 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5425 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005426 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005427 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005428
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005429- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005430 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5431 module:
5432
5433 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005434
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005435 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5436 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005437
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005438 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5439 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005440
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005441 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5442
5443 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5444
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005445- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005446 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5447 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5448 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005449
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005450New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005451-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005452
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005453- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5454 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5455 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5456 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5457 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005458
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005459Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005460-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005461
5462Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005463-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005464
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005465- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5466 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5467 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5468 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005469 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5470 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5471 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5472 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5473 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005474
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005475- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005476 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5477
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005478
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005479What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5480===========================
5481
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005482*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5483
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005484Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005485-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005486
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005487- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5488 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5489
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005490- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5491 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5492 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005493
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005494- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5495 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5496 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5497 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005498
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005499- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5500
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005501- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005502
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005503Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005504-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005505
5506- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005507 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005508 the module docstring for details.
5509
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005510Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005511-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005512
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005513- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005514 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5515 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5516 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005517
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005518- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5519 Nick Mathewson.
5520
5521Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005522----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005523
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005524- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5525 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5526 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5527 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5528 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5529 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5530 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5531 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5532
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005533- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5534 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5535 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5536 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5537
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005538- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5539 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5540 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5541 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5542 come a long way).
5543
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005544- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5545 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5546 write filters for these warnings).
5547
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005548- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5549 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5550 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5551 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5552 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5553
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005554- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5555 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5556 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5557 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5558 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5559 older distribution.
5560
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005561Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005562-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005563
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005564- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5565 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005566 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005567
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005568- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5569 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5570 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5571
5572- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5573
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005574- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5575
5576- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5577
5578- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5579
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005580- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005581
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005582- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5583
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005584New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005585-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005586
5587C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005588-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005589
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005590- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5591 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5592 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5593 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5594 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5595 against buffer overruns.
5596
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005597- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005598 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5599 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005600 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5601 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5602 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5603
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005604- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5605 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5606 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5607 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5608 deprecated.
5609
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005610Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005611-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005612
5613- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5614 relevant is found.
5615
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005616
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005617What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005618===========================
5619
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005620*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5621
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005622Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005623----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005624
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005625- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5626 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5627 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5628 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5629 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5630 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5631 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5632 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005633 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005634 repaired.
5635
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005636- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005637 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005638 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5639 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5640 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5641 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5642 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5643 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5644 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5645 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5646
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005647- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5648 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5649 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5650 leading BMO character).
5651
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005652- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5653 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5654 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5655
5656 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5657 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5658 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005659
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005660 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5661 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5662 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5663 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5664 for various simple to use conversions.
5665
5666 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5667 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5668
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005669 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5670 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5671 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5672 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5673 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5674 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5675 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5676 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5677 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5678 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5679 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5680 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5681 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5682 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5683 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005684
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005685- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5686 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5687 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005688 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005689 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005690
5691 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005692 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5693 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5694 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5695 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5696 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005697 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5698 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005699
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005700 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5701 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5702 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005703 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005704
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005705- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5706 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5707 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5708 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5709 floating arithmetic,
5710
5711 x = 9007199254740992.0
5712 print long(x)
5713
5714 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5715 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5716 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5717 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5718 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5719 functions are of good quality).
5720
5721 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5722 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5723 algorithms to break.
5724
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005725- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5726 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5727 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5728 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5729 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5730 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5731 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5732 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5733 order.
5734
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005735- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5736 operation along the most common code paths.
5737
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005738- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5739 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5740
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005741- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5742 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5743 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5744 {}.update(UserDict())
5745
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005746- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5747 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5748 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5749 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5750 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5751 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5752 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5753 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5754
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005755- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005756 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005757
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005758 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005759 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5760 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005761 join() method of strings
5762 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005763 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5764 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005765 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005766 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005767
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005768- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5769 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5770
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005771- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5772 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5773
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005774- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5775 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5776 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5777 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5778
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005779- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5780 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005781 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005782 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5783 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005784
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005785- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5786
5787
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005788Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005789-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005790
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005791- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005792 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005793 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5794 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5795
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005796- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5797 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5798
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005799- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5800 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5801 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5802 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5803
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005804- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5805 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5806 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5807
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005808- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5809
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005810- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5811
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005812- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5813 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5814 that are still imported into string.py).
5815
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005816- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5817
5818- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5819 Now it does.
5820
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005821- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5822
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005823- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5824 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5825 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5826 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5827 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005828 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5829 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005830
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005831- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5832 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5833 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5834 'help(object)'.
5835
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005836Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005837-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005838
5839- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005840 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005841 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5842 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5843
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005844- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005845 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5846 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005847
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005848C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005849-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005850
5851- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5852 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005853
5854----
5855
5856**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**