blob: 77dbacdb6879737a3ccab3bffb922eadf619b92f [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 Brandlcd4d1e82005-12-27 17:37:07 +000015- Bug #959576: The pwd module is now builtin. This allows Python to be
16 built on UNIX platforms without $HOME set.
17
Neal Norwitzc10978f2005-12-19 06:07:16 +000018- Bug #1072182, fix some potential problems if characters are signed.
19
Neal Norwitz5d0ad502005-12-19 04:27:42 +000020- Bug #889500, fix line number on SyntaxWarning for global declarations.
21
Neal Norwitzdb83eb32005-12-18 05:29:30 +000022- Bug #1378022, UTF-8 files with a leading BOM crashed the interpreter.
23
Neal Norwitze7214a12005-12-18 05:03:17 +000024- Support for converting hex strings to floats no longer works.
25 This was not portable. float('0x3') now raises a ValueError.
26
Barry Warsaw2a38a862005-12-18 01:27:35 +000027- Patch #1382163: Expose Subversion revision number to Python. New C API
28 function Py_GetBuildNumber(). New attribute sys.build_number. Build number
29 is now displayed in interactive prompt banner.
30
Georg Brandlfa166682005-12-17 21:45:17 +000031- Implementation of PEP 341 - Unification of try/except and try/finally.
32 "except" clauses can now be written together with a "finally" clause in
Neal Norwitz11ca77e2005-12-17 22:24:12 +000033 one try statement instead of two nested ones. Patch #1355913.
Georg Brandlfa166682005-12-17 21:45:17 +000034
Hye-Shik Chang835b2432005-12-17 04:38:31 +000035- Bug #1379994: Builtin unicode_escape and raw_unicode_escape codec
36 now encodes backslash correctly.
37
Martin v. Löwisb45b3152005-11-28 17:34:23 +000038- Patch #1350409: Work around signal handling bug in Visual Studio 2005.
39
Georg Brandlf06e30a2005-11-24 15:37:42 +000040- Bug #1281408: Py_BuildValue now works correct even with unsigned longs
41 and long longs.
42
Neal Norwitz67715f02005-11-09 06:59:35 +000043- SF Bug #1350188, "setdlopenflags" leads to crash upon "import"
44 It was possible dlerror() returns a NULL pointer, use a default error
45 message in this case.
46
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +000047- Replaced most Unicode charmap codecs with new ones using the
48 new Unicode translate string feature in the builtin charmap
49 codec; the codecs were created from the mapping tables available
50 at ftp.unicode.org and contain a few updates (e.g. the Mac OS
51 encodings now include a mapping for the Apple logo)
52
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +000053- Added a few more codecs for Mac OS encodings
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +000054
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +000055- Speed up some Unicode operations.
56
57- A new AST parser implementation was completed.
58
Neal Norwitzb6570f52005-10-21 06:26:10 +000059- SF bug #1167751: fix incorrect code being for generator expressions.
Neal Norwitz16af7342005-10-21 06:25:33 +000060 The following code now raises a SyntaxError: foo(a = i for i in range(10))
61
Neal Norwitz708e51a2005-10-03 04:48:15 +000062- SF Bug #976608: fix SystemError when mtime of an imported file is -1.
63
Neal Norwitz11bd1192005-10-03 00:54:56 +000064- SF Bug #887946: fix segfault when redirecting stdin from a directory.
65 Provide a warning when a directory is passed on the command line.
66
Neal Norwitz40d37812005-10-02 01:48:49 +000067- Fix segfault with invalid coding.
68
69- SF bug #772896: unknown encoding results in MemoryError.
70
Raymond Hettinger6b27cda2005-09-24 21:23:05 +000071- All iterators now have a Boolean value of true. Formerly, some iterators
72 supported a __len__() method which evaluated to False when the iterator
73 was empty.
74
Guido van Rossum630db602005-09-20 18:49:54 +000075- On 64-bit platforms, when __len__() returns a value that cannot be
76 represented as a C int, raise OverflowError.
77
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000078- test__locale is skipped on OS X < 10.4 (only partial locale support is
Walter Dörwald6611a8b2005-10-09 19:28:35 +000079 present).
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000080
Georg Brandl80bbf3f2005-09-14 19:38:29 +000081- SF bug #893549: parsing keyword arguments was broken with a few format
82 codes.
83
Guido van Rossum8ee3e5a2005-09-14 18:09:42 +000084- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on AIX 5.3
85 with IBM's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1284289). This also closes SF
86 bug #105470: test_pwd fails on 64bit system (Opteron).
87
Guido van Rossum539c6622005-09-14 17:49:54 +000088- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on HP-UX 11 on
89 Itanium2 with HP's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1225212).
90
Georg Brandl4550b8d2005-08-26 06:43:52 +000091- Disallow keyword arguments for type constructors that don't use them
Georg Brandl02c42872005-08-26 06:42:30 +000092 (fixes bug #1119418).
93
Martin v. Löwisd35edda2005-08-24 08:39:24 +000094- Forward UnicodeDecodeError into SyntaxError for source encoding errors.
95
Barry Warsawe2eca0b2005-08-15 18:14:19 +000096- SF bug #900092: When tracing (e.g. for hotshot), restore 'return' events for
97 exceptions that cause a function to exit.
98
Raymond Hettinger9f1a6792005-07-31 01:16:36 +000099- The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
100 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
101 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
102
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +0000103- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
104
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +0000105- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
106 reference counts in some error exit cases.
107
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000108- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
109 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
110 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
111 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
112 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
113 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
114 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
115 realloc.
116
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +0000117- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
118 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
119
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +0000120- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
121 like their int counterparts.
122
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +0000123- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
124 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
125 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
126 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
127 for a longer write-up of the problem).
128
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +0000129- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
130 serializing floats.
131
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +0000132- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
133 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
134 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
135
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +0000136- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
137 278.
138
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000139- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
140 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
141 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
142 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000143 to the base class has been moved to the proper nb_* magic slot and out of
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000144 PyNumber_*().
145 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
146
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +0000147- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
148 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
149 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
150 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
151
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +0000152- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
153 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
154 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
155 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
156 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
157
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +0000158- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
159 disabled caused a crash.
160
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000161- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
162 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
163
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000164- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +0000165 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
166
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +0000167- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
168
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000169- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +0000170 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
171 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
172 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000173
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +0000174- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
175
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +0000176- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
177 returning None.
178
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000179- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +0000180 ('\') with a specific error message.
181
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +0000182- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
183
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +0000184- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
185 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
186
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000187- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000188 an ferror() call.
189
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000190- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
191 list.sort().
192
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000193- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
194 (2+3) --> (5).
195
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000196- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
197
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000198- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
199 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000200
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000201- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
202 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
203 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
204
Neil Schemenauercf52c072005-08-12 17:34:58 +0000205- Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a
206 unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and
207 calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance.
208
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000209Extension Modules
210-----------------
211
Neal Norwitz40c6b472006-01-05 05:43:35 +0000212- Fix 64-bit problems in bsddb.
213
Neal Norwitz8856fb72005-12-18 03:34:22 +0000214- Patch #1365916: fix some unsafe 64-bit mmap methods.
215
Hye-Shik Changc5c57e62005-12-12 11:48:32 +0000216- Bug #1290333: Added a workaround for cjkcodecs' _codecs_cn build
217 problem on AIX.
218
Georg Brandla13c2442005-11-22 19:30:31 +0000219- Bug #869197: os.setgroups rejects long integer arguments
220
Neal Norwitz0f46bbf2005-11-03 05:00:25 +0000221- Bug #1346533, select.poll() doesn't raise an error if timeout > sys.maxint
222
Neal Norwitz7b631792005-11-02 05:26:07 +0000223- Bug #1344508, Fix UNIX mmap leaking file descriptors
224
Neal Norwitzf3396542005-10-28 05:52:22 +0000225- Patch #1338314, Bug #1336623: fix tarfile so it can extract
226 REGTYPE directories from tarfiles written by old programs.
227
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +0000228- Get bsddb module to build with BSD DB version 3.2
229
Neal Norwitz484d9a42005-09-30 04:46:49 +0000230- Patch #1309009, Fix segfault in pyexpat when the XML document is in latin_1,
231 but Python incorrectly assumes it is in UTF-8 format
232
Georg Brandle677adc2005-09-29 13:40:49 +0000233- Fix parse errors in the readline module when compiling without threads.
234
Hye-Shik Chang9ceebd52005-09-24 14:58:47 +0000235- Patch #1288833: Removed thread lock from socket.getaddrinfo on
236 FreeBSD 5.3 and later versions which got thread-safe getaddrinfo(3).
237
Michael W. Hudson10402a32005-09-22 09:19:01 +0000238- Patches #1298449 and #1298499: Add some missing checks for error
239 returns in cStringIO.c.
240
Neal Norwitz058bde12005-09-21 06:44:25 +0000241- Patch #1297028: fix segfault if call type on MultibyteCodec,
242 MultibyteStreamReader, or MultibyteStreamWriter
243
Neal Norwitzcfe7dd92005-09-19 06:49:27 +0000244- Fix memory leak in posix.access().
245
Martin v. Löwis8b291e22005-09-18 08:17:56 +0000246- Patch #1213831: Fix typo in unicodedata._getcode.
247
Georg Brandlfb1ef852005-09-14 20:53:32 +0000248- Bug #1007046: os.startfile() did not accept unicode strings encoded in
249 the file system encoding.
250
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000251- Patch #756021: Special-case socket.inet_aton('255.255.255.255') for
252 platforms that don't have inet_aton().
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000253
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000254- Bug #1215928: Fix bz2.BZ2File.seek() for 64-bit file offsets.
255
256- Bug #1191043: Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines for files containing one
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000257 line without newlines.
258
Georg Brandl38387b82005-08-24 07:17:40 +0000259- Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did
260 on Windows.
261
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000262- Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
Martin v. Löwisebd9d5b2005-08-09 15:00:59 +0000263 st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
264
Michael W. Hudson8137bea2005-07-27 20:24:40 +0000265- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
266 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
267 for large or negative values.
268
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000269- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000270 implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false.
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000271
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000272- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
273
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000274- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
275 if available on the platform.
276
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000277- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
278 available on the platform.
279
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000280- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
281 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
282
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000283- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
284
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000285- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
286 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
287 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
288
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000289- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
290
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000291- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
292 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
293
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000294- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000295 file size.
296
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000297- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
298
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000299- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
300 {remove_history,replace_history}
301
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000302- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
303 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000304
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000305- stat_float_times is now True.
306
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000307- array.array objects are now picklable.
308
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000309- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
310 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
311
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000312- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
313 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
314 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
315
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000316- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
317 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000318
319Library
320-------
321
Neal Norwitzab86f8e2005-12-23 21:44:36 +0000322- Patch #1157027: cookielib mishandles RFC 2109 cookies in Netscape mode
323
Neal Norwitz338e7862005-12-23 21:27:46 +0000324- Patch #1117398: cookielib.LWPCookieJar and .MozillaCookieJar now raise
325 LoadError as documented, instead of IOError. For compatibility,
326 LoadError subclasses IOError.
327
Brett Cannon3cbd0382005-12-16 22:49:23 +0000328- Added the hashlib module. It provides secure hash functions for MD5 and
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000329 SHA1, 224, 256, 384, and 512. Note that recent developments make the
330 historic MD5 and SHA1 unsuitable for cryptographic-strength applications.
331 In <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-December/058850.html>
332 Ronald L. Rivest offered this advice for Python:
333
334 "The consensus of researchers in this area (at least as
335 expressed at the NIST Hash Function Workshop 10/31/05),
336 is that SHA-256 is a good choice for the time being, but
337 that research should continue, and other alternatives may
338 arise from this research. The larger SHA's also seem OK."
Brett Cannon3cbd0382005-12-16 22:49:23 +0000339
Fredrik Lundh7e0aef02005-12-12 18:54:55 +0000340- Added a subset of Fredrik Lundh's ElementTree package. Available
341 modules are xml.etree.ElementTree, xml.etree.ElementPath, and
342 xml.etree.ElementInclude, from ElementTree 1.2.6.
343
Martin v. Löwis307021f2005-11-27 16:59:04 +0000344- Patch #1162825: Support non-ASCII characters in IDLE window titles.
345
Georg Brandl1f663572005-11-26 16:50:44 +0000346- Bug #1365984: urllib now opens "data:" URLs again.
347
Brett Cannonad07ff22005-11-23 02:15:50 +0000348- Patch #1314396: prevent deadlock for threading.Thread.join() when an exception
349 is raised within the method itself on a previous call (e.g., passing in an
350 illegal argument)
351
Brett Cannon5d0bf942005-11-02 23:04:26 +0000352- Bug #1340337: change time.strptime() to always return ValueError when there
353 is an error in the format string.
354
Georg Brandle8f24432005-10-03 14:16:44 +0000355- Patch #754022: Greatly enhanced webbrowser.py (by Oleg Broytmann).
356
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000357- Bug #729103: pydoc.py: Fix docother() method to accept additional
Georg Brandl8b813db2005-10-01 16:32:31 +0000358 "parent" argument.
359
Georg Brandlaa935172005-09-29 20:49:16 +0000360- Patch #1300515: xdrlib.py: Fix pack_fstring() to really use null bytes
361 for padding.
362
Georg Brandl80ba8e82005-09-29 20:16:07 +0000363- Bug #1296004: httplib.py: Limit maximal amount of data read from the
364 socket to avoid a MemoryError on Windows.
365
Matthias Klosef3f231f2005-09-20 07:02:49 +0000366- Patch #1166948: locale.py: Prefer LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE and LANG over LANGUAGE
367 to get the correct encoding.
368
369- Patch #1166938: locale.py: Parse LANGUAGE as a colon separated list of
370 languages.
371
Martin v. Löwis4ed67382005-09-18 08:34:39 +0000372- Patch #1268314: Cache lines in StreamReader.readlines for performance.
373
Brett Cannona783d062005-09-15 02:34:56 +0000374- Bug #1290505: Fix clearing the regex cache for time.strptime().
375
Martin v. Löwis5dbdc592005-08-27 10:07:56 +0000376- Bug #1167128: Fix size of a symlink in a tarfile to be 0.
377
Georg Brandl5a650a22005-08-26 08:51:34 +0000378- Patch #810023: Fix off-by-one bug in urllib.urlretrieve reporthook
379 functionality.
380
Martin v. Löwis8b595142005-08-25 11:03:38 +0000381- Bug #1163178: Make IDNA return an empty string when the input is empty.
382
Georg Brandl532efab2005-08-24 22:34:21 +0000383- Patch #848017: Make Cookie more RFC-compliant. Use CRLF as default output
384 separator and do not output trailing semicola.
385
Georg Brandlb9256022005-08-24 18:46:39 +0000386- Patch #1062060: urllib.urlretrieve() now raises a new exception, named
387 ContentTooShortException, when the actually downloaded size does not
388 match the Content-Length header.
389
Martin v. Löwis0a5d4a22005-08-24 14:55:22 +0000390- Bug #1121494: distutils.dir_utils.mkpath now accepts Unicode strings.
391
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000392- Bug #1178484: Return complete lines from codec stream readers
393 even if there is an exception in later lines, resulting in
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000394 correct line numbers for decoding errors in source code.
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000395
Georg Brandl6d2b3462005-08-24 07:36:17 +0000396- Bug #1192315: Disallow negative arguments to clear() in pdb.
397
Martin v. Löwisb813c532005-08-07 20:51:04 +0000398- Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
399
Georg Brandl649f8e72005-08-03 07:30:12 +0000400- Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
401 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
402
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000403- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
404 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
405 Tkdnd.
406
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000407- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
408 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
409
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000410- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
411 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
412
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000413- textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000414 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
415
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000416- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
417 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
418
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000419- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
420 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
421
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000422- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000423 it can be missing in embedded interpreters
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000424
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000425- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
426
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000427- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
428 error messages.
429
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000430- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
431
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000432- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
433 Bug #1224621.
434
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000435- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
436 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
437 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
438 terminates by raising StopIteration.
439
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000440- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
441
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000442- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
443 component of the path.
444
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000445- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
446 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
447 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
448 class at all.
449
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000450- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
451 files to PyPI.
452
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000453- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
454 them to PyPI.
455
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000456- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
457 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
458 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
459 work as expected.
460
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000461- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
462 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
463
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000464- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000465 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
466
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000467- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
468
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000469- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
470 to build.
471
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000472- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
473 symbolic links on Windows.
474
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000475- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000476 profile.py if available.
477
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000478- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
479
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000480- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
481 in LWPCookieJar.
482
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000483- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
484
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000485- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
486
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000487- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
488
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000489- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
490
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000491- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
492
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000493- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
494
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000495- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
496
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000497- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
498
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000499- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
500 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
501 be exploited in various ways.
502
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000503- Bug #1222790: in SimpleXMLRPCServer, set the reuse-address and close-on-exec
Andrew M. Kuchling3a976052005-12-04 15:07:41 +0000504 flags on the HTTP listening socket.
505
Andrew M. Kuchlinge63fde72005-12-04 15:36:57 +0000506- Bug #792570: SimpleXMLRPCServer had problems if the request grew too large.
507 Fixed by reading the HTTP body in chunks instead of one big socket.read().
508
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000509- Patches #893642, #1039083: add allow_none, encoding arguments to constructors of
Andrew M. Kuchling10a16de2005-12-04 16:34:40 +0000510 SimpleXMLRPCServer and CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler.
511
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000512- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
513
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000514- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
515
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000516- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
517
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000518- Enhancements to the csv module:
519
520 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000521 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000522 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000523 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
524 reporting.
525 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
526 dictates.
527 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000528 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000529 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000530 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
531 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000532 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
533 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000534 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000535 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
536 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
537 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
538 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
539 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
540 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
541 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
542 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
543 without first creating a dialect class.
544 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
545 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
546 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000547 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000548 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
549 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000550 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
551 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
552 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
553 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000554 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
555 This has been fixed.
556
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000557- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
558 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
559 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
560 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
561
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000562- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
563
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000564- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
565 (Bug #951915).
566
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000567- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
568 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
569 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000570 encoding alias table.
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000571
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000572- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
573
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000574- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
575 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
576
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000577- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
578
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000579- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
580
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000581- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
582
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000583- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
584
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000585- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
586
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000587- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
588 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
589 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
590
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000591- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000592 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000593
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000594- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
595 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
596 tokenizer with very long source lines.
597
Barry Warsaw538561e2006-01-01 21:48:54 +0000598- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called
599 immediately after creating the object, without any intervening
600 ``.decompress()`` calls.
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000601
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000602- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
603 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000604
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000605- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
606 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
607
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000608- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
609 correctly.
610
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000611- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
612 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
613 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
614 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
615 between two lines.
616
Walter Dörwalda47d1c02005-08-30 10:23:14 +0000617- Bug #1251300: On UCS-4 builds the "unicode-internal" codec will now complain
618 about illegal code points. The codec now supports PEP 293 style error
619 handlers.
620
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000621- Bug #1235646: ``codecs.StreamRecoder.next()`` now reencodes the data it reads
Walter Dörwaldc5238b82005-09-01 11:56:53 +0000622 from the input stream, so that the output is a byte string in the correct
623 encoding instead of a unicode string.
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000624
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000625- Bug #1202493: Fixing SRE parser to handle '{}' as perl does, rather than
626 considering it exactly like a '*'.
627
Walter Dörwald007f8df2005-10-09 19:42:27 +0000628- Bug #1245379: Add "unicode-1-1-utf-7" as an alias for "utf-7" to
629 ``encodings.aliases``.
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000630
Walter Dörwald09f0dd52005-11-21 19:10:07 +0000631- ` uu.encode()`` and ``uu.decode()`` now support unicode filenames.
632
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000633Build
634-----
635
Martin v. Löwisfd9a72a2006-01-08 10:07:33 +0000636- Patch #881820: look for openpty and forkpty also in libbsd.
637
Martin v. Löwis64c33dd2006-01-03 07:42:14 +0000638- The sources of zlib are now part of the Python distribution (zlib 1.2.3).
639 The zlib module is now builtin on Windows.
640
Martin v. Löwisd5845ec2005-12-30 12:31:38 +0000641- Use -xcode=pic32 for CCSHARED on Solaris with SunPro.
642
Martin v. Löwis147fbe52005-08-07 21:09:30 +0000643- Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
644 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
645
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000646- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
647 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
648
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000649- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
650 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
651 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000652 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000653
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000654- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
655 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
656 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
657
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000658- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
659
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000660- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
661 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
662
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000663- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
664 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
665 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
666 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
667 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
668 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
669 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
670 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
671
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000672- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
673 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
674 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
675 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
676
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000677
678C API
679-----
680
Raymond Hettingerbeb31012005-08-16 03:47:52 +0000681- Added a C API for set and frozenset objects.
682
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000683- Removed PyRange_New().
684
Walter Dörwaldd1c1e102005-10-06 20:29:57 +0000685- Patch #1313939: PyUnicode_DecodeCharmap() accepts a unicode string as the
686 mapping argument now. This string is used as a mapping table. Byte values
687 greater than the length of the string and 0xFFFE are treated as undefined
688 mappings.
689
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000690
691Tests
692-----
693
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000694- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000695
Hye-Shik Changaaa2f1d2005-12-10 17:44:27 +0000696- Patch #1276356: New resource "urlfetch" is implemented. This enables
697 even impatient people to run tests that require remote files.
698
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000699
700Documentation
701-------------
702
Georg Brandl32252422005-09-14 20:42:00 +0000703- Bug #1274828: Document os.path.splitunc().
704
Georg Brandl79c122f2005-08-24 07:31:33 +0000705- Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py.
706
Georg Brandl6f2bbd32005-08-24 07:26:55 +0000707- Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation.
708
Georg Brandlf13c4ba2005-08-02 10:28:08 +0000709- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
710
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000711- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
712
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000713- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
714
715- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
716
717- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
718
719- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
720
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000721- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
722 Closes bug #1166582.
723
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000724- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
725 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
726 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
727
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000728Mac
729---
730
731
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000732New platforms
733-------------
734
735- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
736
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000737
738Tools/Demos
739-----------
740
Georg Brandl56897312005-08-24 18:32:30 +0000741- Added two new files to Tools/scripts: pysource.py, which recursively
742 finds Python source files, and findnocoding.py, which finds Python
743 source files that need an encoding declaration.
744 Patch #784089, credits to Oleg Broytmann.
745
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000746- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
747
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000748- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000749
Barry Warsaw538561e2006-01-01 21:48:54 +0000750- Fixed a display glitch in Pynche, which could cause the right arrow to
751 wiggle over by a pixel.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000752
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000753What's New in Python 2.4 final?
754===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000755
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000756*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000757
758Core and builtins
759-----------------
760
761- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
762 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
763 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
764
765
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000766What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
767==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000768
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000769*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000770
771Core and builtins
772-----------------
773
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000774- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
775 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
776 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
777
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000778
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000779Library
780-------
781
782- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
783 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
784 raised is re-raised.
785
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000786- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
787 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
788
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000789- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
790 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
791 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
792 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
793 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
794 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
795 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
796 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
797 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
798 by the slice are recomputed now.
799
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000800- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000801
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000802Build
803-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000804
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000805- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
806 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
807 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000808
809C API
810-----
811
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000812- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
813
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000814
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000815What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
816================================
817
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000818*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000819
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000820License
821-------
822
823The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
824is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
825changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
826Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
827intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
828durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
829the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
830License::
831
832 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
833
834says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
835to Python 2.1.1.
836
837The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
838License Version 2.
839
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000840Core and builtins
841-----------------
842
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000843- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
844 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
845 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
846 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
847 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
848 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
849 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
Andrew M. Kuchlingb2a739d2005-11-22 15:14:44 +0000850 ``AttributeError`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000851 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
852 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
853
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000854- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000855
856Extension Modules
857-----------------
858
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000859- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
860 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
861 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
862 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000863
864Library
865-------
866
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000867- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
868 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
869 returned.
870
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000871- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
872
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000873- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
874 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
875
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000876- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
877
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000878- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
879 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000880
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000881- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
882
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000883- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
884
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000885- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000886 the source code is updated and reloaded.
887
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000888Build
889-----
890
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000891- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370d2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000892
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000893What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
894================================
895
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000896*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000897
898Core and builtins
899-----------------
900
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000901- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000902 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
903
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000904- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
905 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
906 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
907 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
908
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000909- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
910 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
911
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000912- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
913 constant.
914
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000915- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
916 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
917 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
918 large), and to anomalies such as
919 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
920 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
921 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
922 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000923
924Extension modules
925-----------------
926
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000927- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
928 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000929 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
930 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
931 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000932
933Library
934-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000935
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000936- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000937 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000938 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
939 --swig-cpp.
940
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000941- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
942 it is set.
943
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000944- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000945
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000946- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
947 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
948 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
949 Closes bug #1039270.
950
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000951- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000952
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000953 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000954 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
955 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
956 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
957 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
958 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
959 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
960 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
961 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
962 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
963 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
964 + Updates to documentation.
965
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000966- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
967 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
968 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
969 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
970
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000971- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000972
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000973- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
974 applications should use the getmember function.
975
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000976- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
977
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000978- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
979 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
980 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
981 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
982 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
983 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
984 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
985 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
986 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
987
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000988- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
989 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000990 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000991
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000992- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
993 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
994 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
995 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
996 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
997 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
998 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
999 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001000
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +00001001- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
1002 the new public features (of which there are many).
1003
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +00001004- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001005 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
1006 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
1007 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
1008 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +00001009 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001010
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +00001011- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
1012
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +00001013- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
1014 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
1015 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
1016 options.
1017
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +00001018- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
1019 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
1020 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
1021 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
1022 conditions under which non-string values work.
1023
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001024Build
1025-----
1026
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +00001027- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
1028 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
1029 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
1030
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +00001031- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
1032 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
1033 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
1034 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
1035 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001036
1037C API
1038-----
1039
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +00001040- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
1041 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
1042
1043- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
1044
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +00001045- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
1046 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
1047 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
1048 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
1049 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
1050 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
1051 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
1052 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
1053 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
1054
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +00001055- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
1056
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +00001057- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
1058 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
1059 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001060
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001061Tests
1062-----
1063
1064- test__locale ported to unittest
1065
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001066Mac
1067---
1068
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +00001069- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
1070 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
1071 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001072
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001073Tools/Demos
1074-----------
1075
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +00001076- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
1077 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
1078 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
1079 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
1080 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001081
1082
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001083What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
1084=================================
1085
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +00001086*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001087
1088Core and builtins
1089-----------------
1090
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001091- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001092 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
1093
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001094- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
1095 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
1096 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
1097 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
1098 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
1099 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
1100 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
1101 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001102 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
1103 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
1104 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
1105 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
1106 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001107
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +00001108- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
1109 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
1110 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
1111 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
1112 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
1113
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +00001114- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
1115
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +00001116- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
1117 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
1118
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +00001119- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
1120 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
1121 modified the list.
1122
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +00001123- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
1124 functions is now writable.
1125
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +00001126- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
1127 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
1128 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
1129 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
1130
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001131- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
1132 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
1133 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
1134 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
1135 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +00001136
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +00001137- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
1138 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
1139
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001140Extension modules
1141-----------------
1142
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001143- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
1144
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +00001145- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
1146 data.
1147
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001148- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
1149 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
1150 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
1151 supposed to have been truncated away.
1152
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +00001153- Added socket.socketpair().
1154
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +00001155- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
1156 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
1157
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001158- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +00001159 versions of Python, have now been removed.
1160
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001161Library
1162-------
1163
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001164- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001165 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001166
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +00001167- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
1168 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
1169
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +00001170- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
1171 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
1172
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001173- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
1174
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +00001175- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
1176 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +00001177
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +00001178- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
1179 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
1180
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +00001181- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
1182
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +00001183- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
1184
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +00001185- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
1186
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +00001187- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
1188 Percivall.
1189
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +00001190- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
1191 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
1192
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001193- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
1194 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
1195 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001196 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001197
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001198- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
1199 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
1200 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
1201 and exponent.
1202
1203- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
1204
1205- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +00001206 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001207 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
1208
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001209- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
1210 to the readline module.
1211
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001212- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001213 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
1214 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001215
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +00001216- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
1217 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
1218 contains symlinks.
1219
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +00001220- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
1221 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
1222
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +00001223- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
1224 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
1225 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1226
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001227- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
1228 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
1229 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
1230 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
1231 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
1232 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
1233 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
1234 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
1235 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
1236 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
1237 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
1238 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
1239 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
1240
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +00001241- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
1242
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001243Tools/Demos
1244-----------
1245
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001246- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
1247 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
1248
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +00001249- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
1250
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001251Build
1252-----
1253
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001254- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
1255 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
1256 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
1257 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
1258 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
1259 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
1260 plans to do so.
1261
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +00001262- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
1263 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
1264
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +00001265- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
1266 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
1267
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001268- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
1269 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
1270
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +00001271- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
1272 GNU/k*BSD systems.
1273
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +00001274- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
1275 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
1276
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001277C API
1278-----
1279
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001280..
1281
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001282Documentation
1283-------------
1284
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001285- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1286 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1287
1288- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1289 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1290 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001291
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001292New platforms
1293-------------
1294
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001295- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1296
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001297Tests
1298-----
1299
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001300..
1301
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001302Windows
1303-------
1304
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001305- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1306 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1307 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1308 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1309 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1310 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1311 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1312 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1313 the problem.
1314
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001315Mac
1316---
1317
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001318..
1319
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001320
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001321What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1322=================================
1323
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001324*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001325
1326Core and builtins
1327-----------------
1328
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001329- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1330 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1331 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1332 sensitive code.
1333
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001334- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001335 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001336
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001337 @staticmethod
1338 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001339
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001340 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001341
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001342- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1343 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1344 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1345 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1346 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1347 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1348 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1349 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1350 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1351 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1352 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1353
1354 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1355 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1356 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1357 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1358 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1359 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1360 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1361
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001362- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1363 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1364
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001365- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001366 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001367
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001368- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001369 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001370 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1371
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001372- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001373 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1374 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1375
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001376- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1377 types that support garbage collection.
1378
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001379- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1380
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001381- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1382 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1383 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1384 Jython.
1385
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001386- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1387
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001388- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1389 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1390
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001391- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1392 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1393 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001394
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001395- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1396 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1397 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1398
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001399Extension modules
1400-----------------
1401
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001402- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1403
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001404Library
1405-------
1406
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001407- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1408 TIS-620
1409
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001410- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1411 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1412 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1413 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1414 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1415 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1416 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1417 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1418 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1419 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1420
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001421- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1422
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001423- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1424 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1425 same as when the argument is omitted).
1426 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1427
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001428- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1429
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001430- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1431 schemes are offered.
1432
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001433- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1434
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001435- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1436 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1437 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1438
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001439- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1440
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001441- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1442 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1443
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001444- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1445 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1446 when dummy_threading is being used.
1447
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001448- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1449 from a tarfile.
1450
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001451- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001452 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001453
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001454- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1455 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1456 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1457 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1458
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001459- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1460 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1461
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001462- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1463 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1464 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1465 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1466 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1467 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1468 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1469 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1470 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1471 by some other method in progress).
1472
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001473- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1474 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1475 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001476
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001477- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1478
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001479- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1480 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1481 AM Kuchling.
1482
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001483- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1484 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1485 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1486
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001487- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1488 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1489 instead of unsigned.
1490
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001491- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001492 no longer part of the public API.
1493
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001494- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1495 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1496 string methods of the same name).
1497
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001498- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001499 SF patch 945642.
1500
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001501- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1502
1503 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1504
1505 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1506 DocTestSuites.
1507
1508- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1509 that provide thread-local data.
1510
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001511- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1512 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1513
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001514- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1515
1516- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1517 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1518 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1519
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001520- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1521
1522 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1523 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1524 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001525
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001526 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1527 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1528 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1529 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1530
1531 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1532 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1533
1534 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1535 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1536 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1537 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1538
1539 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1540 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1541 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1542 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1543 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1544
1545 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1546 wrapping help output.
1547
1548 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1549 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1550 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001551
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001552C API
1553-----
1554
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001555- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1556 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1557 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1558 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1559 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1560 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1561 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1562 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1563 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1564 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1565 its visible semantics have not changed.
1566
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001567- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1568 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1569
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001570Documentation
1571-------------
1572
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001573- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001574
1575 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001576 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001577
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001578 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001579
1580 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1581
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001582- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001583
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001584Tests
1585-----
1586
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001587- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001588 platforms that use the Makefile.
1589
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001590- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1591 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1592 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1593
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001594
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001595What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1596=================================
1597
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001598*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001599
1600Core and builtins
1601-----------------
1602
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001603- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1604 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1605 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1606 objects now (one object instead of three).
1607
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001608- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1609 Windows DLLs.
1610
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001611- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1612 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001613
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001614- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1615 a new .pyc magic.
1616
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001617- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1618 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1619 be there.
1620
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001621- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1622 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1623 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1624
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001625- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1626 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1627 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1628
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001629- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1630
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001631- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1632 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1633 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001634
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001635- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1636 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1637
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001638- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1639
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001640- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001641 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001642
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001643- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1644
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001645- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1646
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001647- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1648 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1649
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001650- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1651 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1652 Fixes bug #858016 .
1653
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001654- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1655 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1656 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1657
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001658- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1659 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1660 improves their performance (about 35%).
1661
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001662- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1663 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1664 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1665
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001666- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1667 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1668 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1669 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1670
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001671- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1672 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001673 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001674 length is not known).
1675
1676- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1677 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001678 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1679 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001680 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1681
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001682- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1683 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1684
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001685- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1686 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1687 keyword arguments.
1688
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001689- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1690 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1691 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1692
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001693- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1694 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1695 cases.
1696
1697- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1698 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1699 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1700 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1701 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1702 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1703 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1704 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1705 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1706 a release build.
1707
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001708- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1709 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1710
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001711- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001712 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001713
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001714- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1715 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1716 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1717 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1718 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1719 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1720 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1721 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1722 destroyed.
1723
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001724- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1725 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1726 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1727 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1728 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1729 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1730 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1731 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1732
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001733- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1734 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1735 character other than a space.
1736
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001737- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1738 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1739 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1740 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1741 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1742 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1743 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1744 attributes with the same name.
1745
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001746- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1747 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1748 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1749 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1750 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1751 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1752 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1753 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1754 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1755 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1756 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1757 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1758 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1759 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001760
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001761- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1762 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1763 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1764 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1765 This has been repaired.
1766
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001767- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1768
1769- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1770
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001771- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1772 over a sequence.
1773
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001774- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001775 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001776
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001777- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1778
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001779- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1780 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1781 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1782 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1783 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1784 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1785 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1786 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1787
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001788- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1789 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1790 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1791
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001792- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1793 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1794 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1795 freelist.
1796
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001797- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1798 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1799
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001800- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1801 number.
1802
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001803- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1804 a TypeError exception.
1805
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001806- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1807 820195.
1808
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001809- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1810 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1811 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1812
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001813- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001814 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1815 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001816
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001817- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1818 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1819 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1820
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001821- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1822 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001823 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001824
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001825- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001826 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1827 the first call.
1828
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001829
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001830Extension modules
1831-----------------
1832
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001833- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1834 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1835
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001836- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1837 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1838 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1839 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1840 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1841 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1842 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001843
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001844- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1845
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001846- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1847
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001848- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1849 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1850
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001851- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1852 fewer false positives.
1853
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001854- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1855 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1856
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001857- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001858 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1859
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001860- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001861 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001862 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001863 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1864 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001865
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001866- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1867 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1868 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1869 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1870
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001871- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1872 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1873 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1874 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1875 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1876 #897625.
1877
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001878- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1879 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1880
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001881- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1882 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1883 and pops on either side of the deque.
1884
1885- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1886 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1887
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001888- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1889 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1890 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1891 other functions that expect a function argument.
1892
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001893- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1894
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001895- os.getsid was added.
1896
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001897- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1898 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1899 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1900
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001901- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1902
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001903- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1904
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001905- readline.clear_history was added.
1906
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001907- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1908
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001909- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1910
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001911- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1912
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001913- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1914
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001915- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1916
1917- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1918
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001919- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1920
1921- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1922
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001923- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1924 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1925 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1926
1927- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1928 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1929 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1930 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1931 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1932 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1933 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1934
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001935- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1936 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1937 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1938 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001939
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001940- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001941 iterators from a single iterable.
1942
1943- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1944 of raising a TypeError exception.
1945
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001946- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1947 as parameter.
1948
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001949Library
1950-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001951
Georg Brandlf0de6a12005-08-22 18:02:59 +00001952- Bug #1266283: The new function "lexists" is now in os.path.__all__.
1953
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001954- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1955 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1956 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001957
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001958- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1959 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1960 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001961
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001962- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001963
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001964- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1965 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001966
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001967- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1968 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1969
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001970- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1971
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001972- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001973 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001974
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001975- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001976 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001977
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001978- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1979
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001980- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1981 on cygwin and mingw32.
1982
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001983- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1984
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001985- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1986 module.
1987
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001988- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1989 installation scheme for all platforms.
1990
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001991- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001992 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001993
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001994- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1995 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1996 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1997
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001998- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1999 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
2000 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
2001
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00002002- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
2003
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00002004- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
2005
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00002006- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
2007 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
2008
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00002009- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
2010 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
2011 type pattern with the same value exists.
2012
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00002013- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
2014 when run from the command prompt).
2015
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00002016- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
2017 not taken into consideration when caching value.
2018
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00002019- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
2020 default sort).
2021
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00002022- Added global runctx function to profile module
2023
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00002024- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
2025
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00002026- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
2027
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00002028- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
2029
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002030- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00002031 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
2032 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
2033 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
2034 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
2035 accordingly.
2036
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00002037- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
2038 decoding standards.
2039
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00002040- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
2041 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
2042 called for all requests.
2043
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00002044- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
2045 they are passed to the compiler.
2046
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00002047- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
2048 indent, width and depth.
2049
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00002050- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
2051 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
2052
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00002053- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
2054 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
2055
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00002056- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
2057
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00002058- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
2059
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00002060- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
2061
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00002062- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
2063 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
2064
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00002065- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00002066 for better performance.
2067
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002068- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00002069
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00002070- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
2071 a string).
2072
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00002073- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
2074
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00002075- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
2076
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00002077- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
2078
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00002079- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
2080
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00002081- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
2082 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
2083 list of fieldnames.
2084
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00002085- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
2086 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
2087
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00002088- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
2089
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00002090- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
2091 empty lists.
2092
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00002093- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
2094 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
2095 and shelves.
2096
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00002097- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
2098 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
2099
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002100- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00002101 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
2102 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002103
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00002104- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
2105 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00002106 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00002107
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002108- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00002109 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
2110 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
2111
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002112- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
2113 and removed in Py2.4.
2114
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00002115- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
2116
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00002117- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
2118
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002119Tools/Demos
2120-----------
2121
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00002122- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
2123 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
2124
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00002125- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
2126
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00002127- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
2128 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
2129 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
2130 destination in situations where both files are given.
2131
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00002132- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
2133 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
2134 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
2135 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
2136
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00002137- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
2138
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00002139- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
2140 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
2141 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
2142 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
2143 now.
2144
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002145- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
2146 in effect
2147
2148- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
2149 C-c C-h
2150
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00002151- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
2152 -d option was given.
2153
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002154Build
2155-----
2156
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00002157- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
2158 build under OS X.
2159
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00002160- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
2161 --enable-profiling.
2162
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00002163- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
2164 is configured --with-tsc.
2165
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00002166- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
2167 on AMD64.
2168
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00002169- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
2170 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
2171
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00002172- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
2173 removed.
2174
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00002175- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
2176 supported (see PEP 11).
2177
2178- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
2179
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00002180- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
2181
2182- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
2183 (see PEP 11).
2184
2185- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
2186 sizeof(char) must be 1.
2187
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002188C API
2189-----
2190
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00002191- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
2192 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
2193 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
2194
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00002195- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
2196 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
2197 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
2198 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
2199
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00002200- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
2201 generator objects.
2202
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002203- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
2204 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00002205 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
2206 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002207
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00002208- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
2209 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
2210
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00002211- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
2212 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
2213 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
2214 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
2215 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
2216
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00002217- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
2218 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
2219 about 10% faster.
2220
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00002221- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
2222 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
2223
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00002224- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
2225 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
2226 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
2227 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
2228
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002229Windows
2230-------
2231
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00002232- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
2233 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
2234 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
2235 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
2236
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00002237- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
2238 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
2239 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
2240
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002241
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002242What's New in Python 2.3 final?
2243===============================
2244
2245*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
2246
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002247IDLE
2248----
2249
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00002250- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
2251 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
2252 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
2253 context-menu actions.
2254
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002255- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
2256 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
2257 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
2258 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
2259 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
2260 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
2261 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
2262 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
2263 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
2264
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002265
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002266What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
2267=============================================
2268
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00002269*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002270
2271Core and builtins
2272-----------------
2273
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002274- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002275 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002276 comment at the end are still unsupported.
2277
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002278Extension modules
2279-----------------
2280
2281- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
2282 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
2283 than once. This has been fixed.
2284
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002285- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2286 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2287 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2288 call.
2289
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002290- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2291
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002292Library
2293-------
2294
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002295- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2296 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2297
2298- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2299 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2300 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2301 restored.
2302
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002303IDLE
2304----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002305
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002306- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002307
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002308Build
2309-----
2310
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002311- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2312 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2313
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002314C API
2315-----
2316
2317Windows
2318-------
2319
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002320- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2321 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2322
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002323- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2324
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002325Mac
2326---
2327
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002328- Various fixes to pimp.
2329
2330- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2331
2332- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2333 more problems than it solves.
2334
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002335
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002336What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2337=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002338
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002339*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2340
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002341Core and builtins
2342-----------------
2343
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002344- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2345 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2346
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002347- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2348 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002349 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002350
2351- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2352 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2353 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002354 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002355
2356- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2357 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002358
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002359- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2360 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2361 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2362
2363- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002364 770247.
2365
2366- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002367
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002368Extension modules
2369-----------------
2370
2371- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2372 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2373
2374- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2375
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002376- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2377
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002378- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2379 contained within the _strptime module.
2380
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002381- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2382 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2383
2384- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002385 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2386
2387- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2388 the find_class attribute, if present.
2389
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002390- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002391
2392 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2393 (SF bug 763298).
2394
2395 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002396 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2397 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2398 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002399
2400 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2401
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002402Library
2403-------
2404
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002405- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2406
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002407- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2408 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2409 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2410 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2411 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2412 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2413 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2414 or Tester().
2415
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002416- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2417 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2418 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2419 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2420 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2421 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2422 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2423 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2424 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002425
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002426 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002427
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002428- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2429 weren't before was an oversight.
2430
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002431- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2432 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2433
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002434- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2435 when there are no lines.
2436
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002437- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2438 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2439
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002440- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2441 to child processes.
2442
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002443- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2444
2445- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2446
2447- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2448 xmlrpclib.
2449
2450- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2451 responses.
2452
2453- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2454 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2455
2456- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2457 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2458 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2459
2460- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2461 used as patterns.
2462
2463- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2464 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2465 than Tk 8.3.
2466
2467- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2468
2469- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002470
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002471Tools/Demos
2472-----------
2473
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002474- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2475
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002476- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2477
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002478- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002479
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002480Build
2481-----
2482
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002483- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2484
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002485- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2486
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002487- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2488 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002489
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002490- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2491 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2492 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002493
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002494C API
2495-----
2496
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002497- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2498 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2499
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002500Windows
2501-------
2502
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002503- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2504 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2505 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2506 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2507 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2508 Python exception ::
2509
2510 thread.error: can't start new thread
2511
2512 is raised now.
2513
2514- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2515 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2516 instead of from DLL teardown.
2517
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002518Mac
2519---
2520
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002521- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002522 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002523 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2524 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2525 the executable in the bundle.
2526
2527- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002528
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002529- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2530
2531- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2532 on Panther.
2533
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002534What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2535================================
2536
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002537*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002538
2539Core and builtins
2540-----------------
2541
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002542- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2543 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2544 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2545 with the -i option.
2546
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002547- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2548 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2549
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002550- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2551 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2552
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002553- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2554 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2555 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2556 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2557 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2558 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2559 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2560 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2561 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2562 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2563 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2564 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2565 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002566
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002567- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2568 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2569 embedded in a lambda expression.
2570
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002571- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2572 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2573 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2574 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2575 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2576
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002577- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2578 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2579 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2580
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002581- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2582 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2583
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002584- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2585 It's writable again.
2586
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002587- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2588 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2589 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002590 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002591
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002592- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2593 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2594 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2595
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002596Extension modules
2597-----------------
2598
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002599- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2600 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2601
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002602- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2603 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2604 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2605 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2606
2607- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2608 collection.
2609
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002610- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2611 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2612 unique within a single program run.
2613
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002614- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2615 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2616
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002617- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2618 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2619
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002620- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2621 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002622
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002623- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2624
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002625- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2626 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2627
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002628- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2629 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2630 for many BSD-derived systems.
2631
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002632
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002633Library
2634-------
2635
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002636- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2637 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2638 primary ones:
2639
2640 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2641 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2642 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2643
2644 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2645 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2646 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2647 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2648 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2649 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2650
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002651- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2652 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2653 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2654 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2655 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2656 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2657 argument.
2658
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002659- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2660 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2661 in the archive.
2662
2663- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2664 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2665
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002666- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2667 569574).
2668
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002669- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2670 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2671 no more.
2672
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002673- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2674 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2675 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2676 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2677 code coverage.
2678
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002679- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2680 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2681 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002682 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2683 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002684
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002685- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2686 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2687 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002688 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002689
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002690- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2691
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002692- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2693 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2694 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2695 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2696
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002697- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2698 handling.
2699
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002700- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2701 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2702
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002703- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2704 in socket.py.
2705
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002706- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2707
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002708- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2709 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2710 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2711 opener with proxy support.
2712
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002713- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2714
2715- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2716
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002717Tools/Demos
2718-----------
2719
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002720- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2721
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002722- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2723
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002724- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2725 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002726
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002727- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2728 files.
2729
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002730Build
2731-----
2732
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002733- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002734 different root directory.
2735
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002736C API
2737-----
2738
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002739- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2740 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2741 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2742 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2743 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2744 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2745 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2746 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2747 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2748 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2749
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002750- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2751 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2752 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2753 from Python.
2754
2755
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002756New platforms
2757-------------
2758
2759None this time.
2760
2761Tests
2762-----
2763
2764- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2765 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2766
2767Windows
2768-------
2769
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002770- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2771
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002772- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2773 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2774 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2775 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2776 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2777 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2778 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2779 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2780 that's what it's for.
2781
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002782Mac
2783---
2784
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002785- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2786 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2787 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2788 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002789- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2790 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2791- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002792
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002793SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2794------------------------------------
2795
2796430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2797598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2798622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2799661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2800683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2801697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2802713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2803724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2804727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2805729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2806730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2807731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2808732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2809733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2810735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2811740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2812744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2813745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2814747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2815749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2816751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2817753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2818755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2819757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2820760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2821
2822
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002823What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2824================================
2825
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002826*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002827
2828Core and builtins
2829-----------------
2830
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002831- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2832 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2833
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002834- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2835 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2836 and cannot be strings).
2837
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002838- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2839 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2840 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2841 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2842
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002843- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2844 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2845 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2846 Python itself.
2847
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002848- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2849 the referenced object, if it has one.
2850
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002851- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2852 the thread started at
2853 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2854
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002855- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2856 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2857 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2858 placed on a list index.
2859
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002860- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2861 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2862 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2863 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2864
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002865- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2866 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2867 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2868 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2869 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2870 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2871 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2872
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002873- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2874 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2875 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2876 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2877 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2878
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002879- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2880 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002881
2882- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2883 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2884 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2885 #693195.)
2886
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002887- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2888 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002889
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002890- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002891 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002892 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2893 interpreter executions, would fail.
2894
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002895- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002896 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002897 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002898
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002899Extension modules
2900-----------------
2901
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002902- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2903 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2904 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2905 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2906
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002907- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2908 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2909
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002910- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2911 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2912 and Greg Chapman.)
2913
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002914- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2915 recursively.
2916
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002917- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002918 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2919 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2920 leaks.
2921
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002922- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2923
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002924- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2925 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2926 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2927 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2928 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2929 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2930 #705836.
2931
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002932- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002933 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2934
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002935- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2936 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2937 See SF bug #692416.
2938
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002939- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2940 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2941
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002942- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2943 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2944 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002945
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002946- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002947 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2948 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2949
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002950- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2951 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2952 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2953 timeouts to work properly.
2954
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002955Library
2956-------
2957
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002958- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2959 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2960 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2961 future release.
2962
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002963- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2964 for querying platform dependent features.
2965
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002966- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002967
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002968- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2969 pickle protocol versions.
2970
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002971- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2972 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2973 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2974
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002975- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2976
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002977- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2978 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2979 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2980 modules.
2981
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002982- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2983 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2984 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2985
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002986- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2987 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2988
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002989- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2990 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2991 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2992
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002993- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002994 MS Office extensions.
2995
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002996- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2997 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2998
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002999- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
3000 execution speed of expressions and statements.
3001
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003002- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
3003 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
3004 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
3005 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
3006 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
3007 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
3008
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00003009- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
3010 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
3011 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003012
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00003013- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
3014 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
3015 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
3016
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00003017- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
3018
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00003019- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
3020 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
3021 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
3022
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003023Tools/Demos
3024-----------
3025
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00003026- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
3027 See the module docstring for details.
3028
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003029Build
3030-----
3031
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00003032- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
3033 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003034
3035C API
3036-----
3037
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003038- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
3039
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00003040- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
3041 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
3042 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
3043
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003044- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
3045 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00003046
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003047 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
3048 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
3049 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00003050
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00003051- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00003052 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
3053
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00003054- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
3055 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
3056 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003057
3058New platforms
3059-------------
3060
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00003061None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003062
3063Tests
3064-----
3065
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00003066- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
3067 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003068
3069Windows
3070-------
3071
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00003072- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
3073 function.
3074
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00003075- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
3076 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003077
3078Mac
3079---
3080
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00003081- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
3082 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00003083
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00003084- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
3085 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003086
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00003087- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
3088 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
3089 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003090
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003091- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00003092 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
3093 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003094
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003095- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
3096 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003097
3098
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003099What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
3100=================================
3101
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003102*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003103
3104Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003105-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003106
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00003107- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
3108 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
3109 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
3110
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00003111- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
3112 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
3113 (SF patch #664376.)
3114
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003115- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
3116 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
3117 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
3118 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
3119 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
3120 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00003121 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003122
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003123- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
3124 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
3125 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
3126 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003127 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003128
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00003129- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
3130 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
3131 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
3132 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
3133 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
3134 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
3135 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
3136 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
3137 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
3138 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
3139 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
3140
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00003141- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
3142 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
3143 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
3144 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
3145 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
3146 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
3147
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00003148- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
3149 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
3150
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00003151- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
3152 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
3153 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
3154 case.)
3155
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00003156- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
3157 passed as unicode strings.
3158
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00003159- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
3160 See SF bug #683467.
3161
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00003162- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
3163 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
3164
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00003165- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
3166
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00003167- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
3168
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00003169- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
3170 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
3171 arguments.
3172
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00003173- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
3174 See SF bug #667147.
3175
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003176- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003177 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003178 See SF bug #676155.
3179
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003180- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003181 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003182 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
3183 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
3184 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
3185 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
3186 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
3187 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003188
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003189Extension modules
3190-----------------
3191
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003192- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
3193 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3194 tp_as_number pointer.
3195
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003196- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
3197 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
3198 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
3199 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
3200 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
3201
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003202- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
3203
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00003204- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
3205
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003206- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00003207 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003208 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
3209 patch #678531.)
3210
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00003211- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
3212 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
3213
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00003214- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
3215 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
3216
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00003217- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
3218
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00003219- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
3220 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
3221 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
3222
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003223- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
3224
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003225- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
3226 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
3227
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003228- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003229
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003230- datetime changes:
3231
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00003232 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
3233
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003234 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
3235 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
3236 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
3237 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
3238 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
3239 now.
3240
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003241 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003242 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
3243 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003244
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003245 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003246 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003247 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
3248 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
3249 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
3250 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003251
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003252 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
3253 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
3254 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003255 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
3256
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003257 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
3258 by a later example coded by Guido.
3259
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003260 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003261 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
3262 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
3263 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003264 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
3265 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
3266
3267 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
3268 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
3269 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
3270 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
3271 tzinfo subclass instance.
3272
3273 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
3274 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
3275 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
3276 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
3277 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
3278 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
3279 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
3280 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003281
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003282 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
3283 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3284 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3285 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3286 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003287 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3288
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003289 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003290
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003291 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3292 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3293 as a naive datetime object.
3294
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003295 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3296 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3297 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3298
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003299 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3300 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3301 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3302 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3303 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3304 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3305 comparison.
3306
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003307 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3308 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3309 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3310 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003311 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003312
3313 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003314
3315 and ::
3316
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003317 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3318
3319 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3320 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3321 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3322 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3323
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003324 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3325 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3326 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3327 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3328 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3329
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003330 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3331 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003332 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3333 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003334
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003335Library
3336-------
3337
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003338- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3339 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3340
3341- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3342 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3343 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3344 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3345 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3346 See PEP 307 for details.
3347
3348- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3349 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3350
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003351- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3352 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003353 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003354 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3355 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003356 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003357
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003358- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3359 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3360
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003361- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3362 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3363 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3364
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003365- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3366
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003367- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3368 exception.
3369
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003370- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3371 class.
3372
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003373- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3374 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3375 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3376
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003377- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3378 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3379
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003380- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003381 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3382 See SF bug #659228.
3383
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003384- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3385 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3386 See SF patch #651082.
3387
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003388- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003389
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003390- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3391 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3392
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003393- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003394 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003395
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003396- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3397 DOS paths from other platforms.
3398
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003399Tools/Demos
3400-----------
3401
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003402- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3403 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3404 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3405 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3406 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3407 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3408 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3409 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3410 example:
3411
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003412 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3413 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003414
3415 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3416
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003417
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003418Build
3419-----
3420
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003421- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3422 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3423 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003424 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3425
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003426 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3427
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003428- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3429 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3430 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3431 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3432 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3433 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3434 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3435 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3436 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3437
3438- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3439 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3440 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3441 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3442
3443- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3444 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3445
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003446C API
3447-----
3448
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003449- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3450 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003451
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003452- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3453 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3454 tp_as_number pointer.
3455
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003456- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3457 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3458 (SF #681367)
3459
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003460- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3461 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3462 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3463 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003464
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003465Tests
3466-----
3467
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003468- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003469 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3470 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3471 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3472 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3473 pydoc.)
3474
3475- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3476
3477- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003478
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003479Windows
3480-------
3481
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003482- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3483 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3484 time).
3485
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003486- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3487 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3488
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003489- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3490 release without strong cryptography.
3491
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003492- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003493 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003494
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003495- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3496 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3497
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003498Mac
3499---
3500
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003501- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3502 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003503
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003504- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3505 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3506 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003507
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003508- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3509 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003510
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003511- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3512 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3513 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3514 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003515
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003516- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003517 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3518 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3519 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003520
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003521
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003522What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003523=================================
3524
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003525*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003526
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003527Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003528--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003529
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003530- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3531
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003532- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3533 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003534 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003535 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003536 a different meaning than before.
3537
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003538- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003539 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003540 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003541
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003542- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003543 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003544 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003545
3546- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3547 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3548 and deallocation.
3549
3550- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3551 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3552
3553- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3554 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3555 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3556 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3557 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3558
3559- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3560 now detected by the garbage collector.
3561
3562- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3563 [SF bug 519621]
3564
3565- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3566 identifier.
3567
3568- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3569 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3570 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3571 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3572 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3573 [SF bug 563060]
3574
3575- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3576 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3577 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3578 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3579 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3580
3581- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3582 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3583 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3584
3585- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3586
3587- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3588 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3589 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3590 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3591 state of the slots would be lost.)
3592
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003593Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003594-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003595
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003596- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003597 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3598 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3599 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3600 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003601 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3602 Jython 2.1.
3603
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003604- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003605 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003606 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3607 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3608 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3609 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3610 these, see PEP 302.
3611
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003612- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3613 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3614 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3615
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003616- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3617 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3618 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3619
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003620- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3621 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3622 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3623
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003624- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3625 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3626 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3627 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3628 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3629 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3630 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3631 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3632 releases or implementations.
3633
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003634- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003635 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3636 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003637
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003638- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3639 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3640
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003641- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3642 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3643 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3644
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003645- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3646 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3647
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003648- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3649 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003650 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3651 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003652
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003653- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3654 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3655 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3656 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3657 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3658
3659 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3660 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3661 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3662 pattern.
3663
3664 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3665 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3666 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3667 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3668
3669 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3670 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3671 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3672 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3673 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3674 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3675
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003676- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3677 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3678 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3679 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3680 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3681 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3682 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3683 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003684
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003685- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3686 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3687 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3688 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3689 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003690 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3691 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3692 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3693 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3694 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3695 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3696 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003697
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003698- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3699 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3700
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003701- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3702 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3703 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3704 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3705 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3706 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3707 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3708 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3709 to Zack Weinberg!
3710
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003711- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3712 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3713 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3714 type. This has been fixed now.
3715
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003716- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3717 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3718 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3719
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003720- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3721 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3722 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3723 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3724 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3725 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3726 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3727 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003728 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003729
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003730- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3731 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3732 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003733
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003734- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3735 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3736 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3737 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3738 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3739 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3740 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3741 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003742 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003743 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3744 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3745
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003746- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3747 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3748 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3749 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3750 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3751 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3752 this.)
3753
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003754- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3755 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003756 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003757 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003758 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3759 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003760 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3761 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003762
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003763- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3764 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3765 currently running.
3766
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003767- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3768 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3769 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3770 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3771
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003772- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3773 as directory names.
3774
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003775- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3776 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3777
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003778- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3779 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3780
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003781- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003782 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3783 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003784
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003785- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3786 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3787 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3788 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3789 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3790
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003791- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3792 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3793 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3794 removed.
3795
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003796- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3797 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3798 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3799
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003800- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3801 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3802 to __debug__.
3803
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003804- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3805 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3806 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3807
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003808- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3809 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3810 deprecated now.
3811
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003812- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3813 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3814 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003815
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003816- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3817 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3818 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3819 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3820 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003821
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003822- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3823 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3824
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003825- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3826 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3827 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003828 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003829 is backward compatible.
3830
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003831- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3832 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3833 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3834 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3835 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3836
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003837- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3838 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3839 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3840 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3841 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3842 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003843
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003844- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3845 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3846
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003847- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3848 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3849
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003850- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3851 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3852 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3853 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3854 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3855
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003856- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3857 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3858 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3859
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003860- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003861 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3862
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003863- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3864 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3865 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003866
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003867- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3868 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3869
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003870- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3871 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3872 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3873
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003874- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3875
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003876Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003877-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003878
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003879- Added three operators to the operator module:
3880 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3881 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3882 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3883
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003884- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3885
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003886- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3887 archives.
3888
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003889- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3890 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3891 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3892
3893 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3894
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003895- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3896 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3897 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003898 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003899
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003900- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3901 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3902 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3903 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003904 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3905 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3906 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3907 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003908
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003909- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3910 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003911
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003912- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3913
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003914- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3915 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3916
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003917- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3918 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3919 supported.
3920
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003921- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3922
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003923- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3924 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003925
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003926- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3927 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3928
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003929- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3930
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003931- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3932 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3933
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003934- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3935 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3936 functions but callable type objects.
3937
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003938- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003939 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003940 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003941
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003942- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3943 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003944
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003945- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3946 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003947
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003948- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3949 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3950 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3951 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3952
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003953- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3954 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003955
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003956- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3957 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3958 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3959 and __imul__.
3960
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003961- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003962 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3963 is called.
3964
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003965- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3966 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3967 interpreter was compiled.
3968
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003969- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3970 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3971 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003972 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003973 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3974 1, not 2.
3975
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003976- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3977 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3978 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3979 limit.
3980
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003981- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3982 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3983 bug #623464.
3984
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003985- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3986 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3987 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3988 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3989
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003990Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003991-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003992
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003993- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3994
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003995- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3996 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3997 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3998 with Python 2.3a2.
3999
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00004000- os.path exposes getctime.
4001
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004002- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004003 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004004 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004005 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004006 unit tests of floating point results.
4007
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00004008- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
4009 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
4010 has been increased.
4011
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00004012- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
4013 executed.
4014
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00004015- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
4016 postinstallation script.
4017
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00004018- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
4019 test the current module.
4020
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004021- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00004022 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
4023 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
4024 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
4025 this behavior needs to be controlled.
4026
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00004027- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00004028 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00004029 Ward's Optik package.
4030
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00004031- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
4032 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
4033 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
4034 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
4035
4036- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
4037 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00004038 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00004039
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00004040- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
4041 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
4042 shelf are binary pickles.
4043
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00004044- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
4045 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
4046
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00004047- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
4048 modules are iterators now.
4049
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00004050- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
4051 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
4052 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
4053 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
4054 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
4055 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004056
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00004057- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
4058 with their entity value.
4059
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00004060- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
4061
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004062- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
4063 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00004064
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004065- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
4066 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004067 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00004068
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00004069- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
4070 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
4071 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
4072 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
4073 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
4074 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
4075 main():
4076
4077 import locale
4078 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
4079
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00004080- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
4081 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
4082
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00004083- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
4084 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
4085 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
4086 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
4087 to the new standard.
4088
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00004089- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
4090 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
4091 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
4092 an extension to the database.
4093
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004094- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
4095 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
4096 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
4097 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00004098 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004099
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004100- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00004101 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004102
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00004103- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
4104 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
4105 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
4106 bounded integers.
4107
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00004108- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
4109 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
4110 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
4111 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
4112 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
4113 in existence.
4114
4115 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
4116 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
4117 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
4118 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
4119 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
4120 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
4121
4122 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
4123 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
4124 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
4125 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
4126
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00004127- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
4128 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
4129 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
4130
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00004131- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
4132
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004133- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
4134 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
4135 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
4136 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
4137
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00004138- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
4139 argument.
4140
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00004141- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
4142 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
4143 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
4144 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
4145 [SF patch 560794].
4146
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004147- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
4148 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
4149 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00004150 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
4151 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
4152 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004153
4154- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
4155 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00004156
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00004157- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
4158 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
4159 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
4160 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00004161
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00004162- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
4163 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
4164 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
4165 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
4166 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
4167
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004168- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00004169
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00004170- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
4171
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00004172- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
4173 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
4174 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
4175 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
4176 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
4177 identical to None.
4178
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00004179- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
4180 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
4181 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
4182 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
4183 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
4184 results now.
4185
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00004186- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
4187 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
4188
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004189- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
4190 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
4191 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
4192 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
4193 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
4194 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
4195 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
4196 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
4197
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00004198- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
4199
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00004200- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
4201 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
4202
4203- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
4204 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
4205 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
4206 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
4207 and other systems.
4208
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004209- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
4210 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
4211 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
4212 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 +00004213 work well with these.
4214
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00004215- compileall now supports quiet operation.
4216
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004217- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00004218 connections.
4219
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00004220- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
4221 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
4222 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
4223
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00004224- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
4225 sets
4226
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00004227- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
4228 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
4229 name.
4230
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00004231- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
4232 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
4233 passed in.
4234
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004235- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00004236 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00004237 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
4238 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00004239
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00004240- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
4241
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00004242- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
4243
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00004244- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
4245 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
4246 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
4247
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004248- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
4249 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
4250 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
4251 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00004252 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004253
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004254- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004255 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004256 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004257
4258- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
4259 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
4260 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
4261
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004262- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00004263 the value of its expression argument.
4264
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004265- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
4266 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
4267 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
4268
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00004269- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
4270 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
4271 skipstone browser was included.
4272
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00004273- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
4274 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
4275
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004276Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004277-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004278
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00004279- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
4280 names in addition to accepting file names.
4281
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00004282- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
4283 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4284 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4285 still used and useful.)
4286
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004287- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4288 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4289 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4290 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004291
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004292- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4293 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4294 the generated binary.
4295
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004296Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004297-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004298
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004299- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4300
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004301- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4302 except in the hands of experts.
4303
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004304- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004305 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4306 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4307 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004308
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004309- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4310 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4311 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4312 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4313 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4314 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4315 builds.
4316
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004317- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4318 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4319 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4320 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4321 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4322 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4323 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4324 new type.
4325
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004326- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004327
4328 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4329 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4330 positive infinities.
4331
4332 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4333 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4334 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4335 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4336 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4337 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4338 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4339
4340 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4341
4342 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4343
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004344- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4345 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4346 size of the executable.
4347
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004348- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4349 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4350 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4351 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004352
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004353- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4354
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004355- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4356 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4357 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004358
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004359- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4360 well as Unix.
4361
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004362- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4363 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4364 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4365 modules in the README file for details.
4366
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004367C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004368-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004369
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004370- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4371 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004372 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004373 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004374 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004375
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004376- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4377 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4378 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4379 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4380 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4381 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004382 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004383 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4384 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4385 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4386 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4387 aligned.)
4388
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004389- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4390 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4391 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4392
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004393- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4394 level.
4395
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004396- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4397 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4398 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4399 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4400 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4401
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004402- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4403 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4404 code.
4405
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004406- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4407 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4408 adjusting for negative indices.
4409
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004410- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4411 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4412 object.
4413
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004414- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4415 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4416 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4417
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004418- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4419 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004420
4421- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4422
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004423- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4424 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4425 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4426 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4427
4428- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4429
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004430- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004431
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004432- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004433 without going through the buffer API.
4434
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004435- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004436
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004437- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4438 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4439 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4440 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4441
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004442- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4443 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4444
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004445- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004446 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4447
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004448New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004449-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004450
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004451- OpenVMS is now supported.
4452
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004453- AtheOS is now supported.
4454
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004455- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4456
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004457- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4458
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004459Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004460-----
4461
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004462- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4463 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4464 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004465
4466Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004467-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004468
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004469- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4470 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4471 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4472 bugs.
4473 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004474 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004475 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4476 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004477 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004478
4479- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004480 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004481
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004482- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4483 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4484
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004485- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4486 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004487 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004488 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4489
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004490- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4491 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4492 use files" uninstall option).
4493
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004494- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4495
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004496- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4497 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4498
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004499- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4500 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4501 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4502
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004503- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4504 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4505 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4506 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4507 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004508 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4509 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4510 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004511
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004512- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004513 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004514 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4515 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4516 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4517 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4518 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4519 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4520 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4521 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4522 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4523 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4524 work around.
4525
4526- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4527 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4528 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4529 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4530 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4531 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4532 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4533 specified with O_CREAT too).
4534
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004535Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004536----
4537
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004538- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004539
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004540- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4541 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4542 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4543
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004544- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4545 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4546 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4547
4548- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4549 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4550 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4551 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4552 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4553 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4554 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4555 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004556
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004557- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4558 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4559 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004560
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004561- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4562 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4563 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4564 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4565 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004566
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004567- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4568 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4569 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004570
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004571- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4572 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004573
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004574- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4575 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4576 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4577 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4578 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004579
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004580- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4581 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4582 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4583
4584- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4585 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4586 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004587
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004588- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4589 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4590 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4591 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004592 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004593
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004594- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4595 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004596
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004597- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4598 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004599
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004600- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004601 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004602 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4603 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004604
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004605
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004606What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004607===============================
4608
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004609*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4610
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004611Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004612--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004613
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004614- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4615 with a custom metaclass.
4616
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004617Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004618-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004619
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004620- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4621 are proxies.
4622
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004623Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004624-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004625
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004626- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4627 very short strings.
4628
4629- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4630 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4631 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4632 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4633 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4634
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004635Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004636-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004637
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004638- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4639 close or delete time).
4640
4641- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4642 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4643
4644- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4645
4646- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004647 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004648
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004649Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004650-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004651
4652Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004653-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004654
4655C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004656-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004657
4658New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004659-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004660
4661Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004662-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004663
4664Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004665-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004666
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004667- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4668
4669- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4670 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4671
4672- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4673 deleted at process exit time.
4674
4675- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4676 in backslash.
4677
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004678Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004679----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004680
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004681- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4682 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4683 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4684
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004685
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004686What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004687===========================
4688
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004689*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4690
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004691Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004692--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004693
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004694- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4695 been extensively updated. See
4696
4697 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4698
4699 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4700
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004701- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4702 deleted!
4703
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004704- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4705 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4706 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4707 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4708 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4709
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004710- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4711
4712 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4713 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4714
4715 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4716 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4717 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4718 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4719 supported anyway.
4720
4721 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4722 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4723
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004724- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4725 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4726 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4727 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4728 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004729
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004730- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4731 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4732 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4733
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004734Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004735-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004736
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004737- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4738 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4739 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4740 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4741 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4742 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004743 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4744 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4745 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4746 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004747
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004748- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4749 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4750 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4751
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004752Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004753-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004754
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004755- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4756
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004757Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004758-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004759
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004760- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4761 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4762 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4763 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4764 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4765 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4766
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004767- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4768
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004769- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4770
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004771- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4772
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004773- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4774 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4775 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4776
4777- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4778
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004779Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004780-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004781
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004782- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4783 off a search on Google.
4784
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004785Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004786-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004787
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004788- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4789 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4790 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4791 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4792 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4793 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4794 other platforms should do likewise.
4795
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004796- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4797 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4798 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4799
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004800C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004801-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004802
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004803- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4804 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4805 producing key-value pairs.
4806
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004807- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004808 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004809 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4810 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4811 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4812 previously went unchallenged.
4813
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004814New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004815-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004816
4817Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004818-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004819
4820Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004821-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004822
4823Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004824----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004825
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004826- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4827 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004828
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004829- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4830 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4831 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4832 home.
4833
4834
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004835What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004836===========================
4837
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004838*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4839
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004840Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004841--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004842
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004843- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4844 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004845
4846 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004847 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004848
4849 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4850 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004851 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004852 This needs to be documented.
4853
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004854- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4855 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4856
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004857- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4858 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4859 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4860
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004861- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4862 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4863
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004864- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4865 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4866 class forbids it).
4867
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004868- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4869 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4870 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4871
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004872- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4873
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004874Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004875-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004876
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004877- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4878 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004879 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004880
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004881- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4882 (like 1 + '').
4883
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004884Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004885-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004886
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004887- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4888 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4889 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4890 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004891 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004892 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4893
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004894- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4895 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4896 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4897 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4898
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004899- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4900 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004901 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4902 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4903 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004904
4905- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4906 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004907
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004908- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4909 bytes on its input.
4910
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004911Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004912-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004913
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004914- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004915 convenience function.
4916
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004917- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4918 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4919 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004920 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4921 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4922 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4923 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4924 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4925 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004926
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004927- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4928 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4929 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4930 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4931
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004932- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4933 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4934 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4935
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004936- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4937 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4938 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4939 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4940
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004941- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4942 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004943 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004944 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4945 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4946 new -l and -e options.
4947
4948- statcache is now deprecated.
4949
4950- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4951 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004952 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004953 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4954 time properly taken into account.
4955
4956- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4957 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4958 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4959 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4960
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004961Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004962-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004963
4964Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004965-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004966
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004967- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4968 is built with libdb3 if available.
4969
4970- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4971
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004972C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004973-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004974
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004975- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4976 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4977 PySequence_Size().
4978
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004979- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4980
4981- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4982 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4983 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4984
4985- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4986 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4987
4988- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4989 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4990
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004991New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004992-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004993
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004994- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4995 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4996
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004997- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4998 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4999
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00005000- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
5001
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005002Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005003-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005004
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00005005- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
5006 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
5007
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005008Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005009-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005010
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005011Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005012----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005013
5014- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
5015 removed completely in the next release.
5016
5017- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
5018 OSX.
5019
5020- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
5021 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
5022
5023- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
5024
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005025
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005026What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005027===========================
5028
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005029*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
5030
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005031Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005032--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005033
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005034- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005035 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005036 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005037 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
5038 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005039 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
5040 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005041 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
5042 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00005043
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00005044- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
5045 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
5046
5047- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
5048 class methods, static methods, and properties.
5049
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005050Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005051-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005052
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00005053- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
5054 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
5055 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
5056 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
5057 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
5058 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
5059 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
5060 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
5061
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005062- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
5063 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
5064 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
5065 example).
5066
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005067- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005068 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005069 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005070 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005071
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005072- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
5073 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
5074 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00005075 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005076
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005077- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
5078 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
5079 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
5080 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
5081 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
5082 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
5083
5084 isinstance(x, (A, B))
5085
5086 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
5087
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005088Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005089-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005090
5091- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
5092
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005093- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
5094
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005095- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
5096 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00005097
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005098- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
5099 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
5100 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
5101 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
5102 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
5103 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00005104 attributes.
5105
5106- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
5107 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
5108 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00005109
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005110- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
5111 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
5112 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005113
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005114- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
5115 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
5116 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005117 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
5118 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
5119
5120- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
5121 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005122
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005123Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005124-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005125
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00005126- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
5127 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
5128
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005129- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
5130 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
5131 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
5132 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
5133
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00005134- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
5135 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
5136 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
5137 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
5138
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00005139 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
5140 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
5141 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
5142 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
5143 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
5144 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
5145 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
5146 without losing information).
5147
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005148- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005149 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
5150 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
5151 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
5152 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
5153 module).
5154
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00005155 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005156 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
5157 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
5158 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
5159 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005160
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005161- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00005162 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
5163 encoding.
5164
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00005165- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
5166 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
5167
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005168- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005169 to allow saving the message body to a file.
5170
5171- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
5172 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
5173 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
5174 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
5175
5176- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
5177
5178- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
5179 ON, and OFF.
5180
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005181- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
5182 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
5183
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005184Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005185-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005186
5187- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
5188 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
5189 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005190
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005191- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
5192 been added: -X and -E.
5193
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005194Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005195-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005196
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005197- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
5198 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
5199
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005200C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005201-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005202
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00005203- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
5204 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
5205 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
5206 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
5207 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
5208
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00005209- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
5210 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
5211 as long) arguments.
5212
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005213- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
5214 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
5215 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
5216 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
5217 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
5218 report any bugs or strange behavior).
5219
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005220- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
5221 input.
5222
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005223New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005224-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005225
5226Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005227-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005228
5229Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005230-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005231
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00005232- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
5233 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
5234 is created for .py and .pyw files.
5235
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005236- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
5237 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
5238 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005239 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005240
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005241 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
5242 # (SIGINT) behavior.
5243 import signal
5244 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005245
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005246 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005247 while 1:
5248 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005249 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005250 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
5251 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
5252 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
5253 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005254
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005255
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005256What's New in Python 2.2a4?
5257===========================
5258
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005259*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
5260
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005261Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005262--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005263
5264- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
5265 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
5266 documentation for all operations on list objects.
5267
5268- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
5269 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
5270 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
5271 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
5272 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
5273 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
5274 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005275
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005276- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005277 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005278 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
5279 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
5280 associate a docstring with a property.
5281
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005282- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
5283 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5284 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5285 other built-in object types.
5286
5287- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5288 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5289 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5290 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5291 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5292
5293- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5294 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5295
5296- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5297 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005298 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005299 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5300 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5301 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5302 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5303 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5304
5305- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5306 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5307 class.
5308
5309- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5310 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5311 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5312 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5313
5314- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5315 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5316 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5317 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5318
5319- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5320 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5321
5322- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5323 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5324 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5325 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5326 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005327 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005328 with the same value as s.
5329
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005330- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5331
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005332Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005333----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005334
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005335- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5336
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005337- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5338 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5339 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5340 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5341 objects.
5342
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005343- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5344 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005345 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5346 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5347
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005348- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5349 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5350 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5351
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005352Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005353-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005354
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005355- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5356 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5357 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5358 by the instances.
5359
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005360- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5361 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5362 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5363
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005364- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5365 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5366 before the entire comparison is complete.
5367
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005368- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5369 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5370 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5371
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005372- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5373 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5374 getwriter().
5375
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005376- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5377 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5378
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005379- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005380 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5381 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5382
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005383- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5384 iterable object.
5385
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005386- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5387 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005388
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005389- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5390 authentication.
5391
5392- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5393 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005394
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005395- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005396 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5397 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5398 a sample driver.)
5399
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005400Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005401-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005402
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005403- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5404 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5405 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5406 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5407 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5408 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5409 kernel has large file support.
5410
5411- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5412 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5413 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5414 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5415 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5416
5417- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5418 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5419 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5420
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005421C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005422-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005423
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005424- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5425 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5426
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005427New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005428-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005429
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005430- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5431 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5432
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005433Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005434-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005435
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005436- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5437 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5438 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5439 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5440 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5441
5442- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5443 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5444 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5445 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5446
5447- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5448 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5449
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005450Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005451-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005452
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005453- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005454 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5455 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005456
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005457
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005458What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5459===========================
5460
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005461*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5462
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005463Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005464----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005465
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005466- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5467 big to represent as a C double.
5468
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005469- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5470 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5471 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5472 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5473 restriction).
5474
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005475- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5476 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5477 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5478 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5479 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5480
5481 >>> dir([])
5482 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5483 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5484 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5485 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5486 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5487 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5488 'reverse', 'sort']
5489
5490 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5491
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005492- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005493 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5494 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5495 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5496 OverflowError exception.
5497
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005498- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005499 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005500 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5501 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5502 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5503 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5504 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005505 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005506 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5507 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5508
5509 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5510 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5511 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5512 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005513
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005514- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005515 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5516 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5517 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5518 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5519 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5520 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5521 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5522 once it is created.
5523
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005524- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5525 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5526 (key, value) pairs.
5527
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005528- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005529 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5530 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5531
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005532- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5533 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5534 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5535 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5536 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005537
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005538- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005539 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5540 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5541
5542 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5543
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005544- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005545 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5546
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005547Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005548-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005549
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005550- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005551 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5552 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005553
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005554- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5555 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5556 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5557 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5558 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5559 in this area anymore).
5560
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005561- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5562 threading.Timer.
5563
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005564- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5565 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5566
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005567- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005568 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5569
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005570- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005571 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5572 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5573 converted to Python longs.
5574
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005575- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005576 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5577
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005578- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5579 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5580 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5581
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005582Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005583-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005584
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005585- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5586 division operators as per PEP 238.
5587
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005588Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005589-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005590
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005591- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5592 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5593 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5594 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5595
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005596C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005597-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005598
5599- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005600
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005601- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5602 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005603 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005604
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005605 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5606 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005607 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005608 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005609
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005610- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005611 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5612 module:
5613
5614 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005615
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005616 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5617 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005618
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005619 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5620 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005621
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005622 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5623
5624 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5625
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005626- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005627 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5628 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5629 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005630
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005631New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005632-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005633
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005634- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5635 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5636 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5637 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5638 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005639
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005640Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005641-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005642
5643Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005644-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005645
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005646- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5647 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5648 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5649 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005650 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5651 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5652 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5653 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5654 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005655
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005656- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005657 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5658
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005659
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005660What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5661===========================
5662
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005663*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5664
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005665Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005666-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005667
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005668- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5669 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5670
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005671- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5672 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5673 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005674
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005675- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5676 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5677 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5678 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005679
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005680- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5681
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005682- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005683
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005684Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005685-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005686
5687- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005688 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005689 the module docstring for details.
5690
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005691Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005692-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005693
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005694- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005695 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5696 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5697 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005698
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005699- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5700 Nick Mathewson.
5701
5702Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005703----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005704
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005705- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5706 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5707 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5708 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5709 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5710 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5711 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5712 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5713
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005714- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5715 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5716 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5717 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5718
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005719- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5720 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5721 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5722 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5723 come a long way).
5724
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005725- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5726 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5727 write filters for these warnings).
5728
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005729- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5730 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5731 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5732 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5733 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5734
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005735- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5736 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5737 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5738 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5739 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5740 older distribution.
5741
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005742Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005743-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005744
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005745- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5746 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005747 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005748
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005749- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5750 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5751 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5752
5753- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5754
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005755- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5756
5757- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5758
5759- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5760
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005761- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005762
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005763- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5764
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005765New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005766-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005767
5768C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005769-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005770
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005771- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5772 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5773 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5774 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5775 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5776 against buffer overruns.
5777
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005778- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005779 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5780 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005781 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5782 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5783 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5784
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005785- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5786 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5787 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5788 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5789 deprecated.
5790
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005791Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005792-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005793
5794- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5795 relevant is found.
5796
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005797
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005798What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005799===========================
5800
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005801*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5802
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005803Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005804----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005805
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005806- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5807 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5808 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5809 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5810 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5811 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5812 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5813 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005814 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005815 repaired.
5816
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005817- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005818 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005819 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5820 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5821 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5822 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5823 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5824 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5825 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5826 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5827
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005828- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5829 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5830 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5831 leading BMO character).
5832
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005833- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5834 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5835 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5836
5837 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5838 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5839 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005840
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005841 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5842 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5843 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5844 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5845 for various simple to use conversions.
5846
5847 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5848 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5849
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005850 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5851 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5852 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5853 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5854 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5855 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5856 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5857 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5858 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5859 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5860 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5861 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5862 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5863 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5864 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005865
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005866- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5867 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5868 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005869 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005870 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005871
5872 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005873 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5874 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5875 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5876 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5877 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005878 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5879 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005880
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005881 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5882 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5883 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005884 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005885
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005886- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5887 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5888 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5889 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5890 floating arithmetic,
5891
5892 x = 9007199254740992.0
5893 print long(x)
5894
5895 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5896 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5897 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5898 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5899 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5900 functions are of good quality).
5901
5902 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5903 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5904 algorithms to break.
5905
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005906- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5907 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5908 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5909 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5910 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5911 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5912 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5913 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5914 order.
5915
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005916- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5917 operation along the most common code paths.
5918
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005919- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5920 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5921
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005922- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5923 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5924 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5925 {}.update(UserDict())
5926
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005927- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5928 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5929 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5930 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5931 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5932 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5933 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5934 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5935
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005936- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005937 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005938
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005939 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005940 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5941 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005942 join() method of strings
5943 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005944 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5945 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005946 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005947 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005948
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005949- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5950 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5951
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005952- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5953 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5954
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005955- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5956 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5957 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5958 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5959
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005960- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5961 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005962 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005963 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5964 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005965
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005966- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5967
5968
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005969Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005970-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005971
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005972- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005973 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005974 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5975 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5976
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005977- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5978 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5979
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005980- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5981 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5982 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5983 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5984
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005985- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5986 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5987 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5988
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005989- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5990
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005991- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5992
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005993- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5994 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5995 that are still imported into string.py).
5996
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005997- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5998
5999- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
6000 Now it does.
6001
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00006002- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
6003
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00006004- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
6005 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
6006 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
6007 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
6008 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00006009 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
6010 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00006011
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00006012- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
6013 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
6014 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
6015 'help(object)'.
6016
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006017Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006018-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006019
6020- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006021 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006022 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
6023 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
6024
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006025- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00006026 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
6027 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006028
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00006029C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006030-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00006031
6032- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
6033 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006034
6035----
6036
6037**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**