| +++++++++++ |
| Python News |
| +++++++++++ |
| |
| (editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.) |
| |
| What's New in Python 3.1 alpha 0 |
| ================================ |
| |
| *Release date: XX-XXX-200X* |
| |
| Core and Builtins |
| ----------------- |
| |
| - Issue #1717: Removed builtin cmp() function, dropped tp_compare |
| slot, the C API functions PyObject_Compare and PyUnicode_Compare and |
| the type definition cmpfunc. The tp_compare slot has been renamed |
| to tp_reserved, and is reserved for future usage. |
| |
| - Issue 1242657: the __len__() and __length_hint__() calls in several tools |
| were suppressing all exceptions. These include list() and bytearray(). |
| |
| - Issue #4707: round(x, n) now returns an integer if x is an integer. |
| Previously it returned a float. |
| |
| - Issue #4753: By enabling a configure option named '--with-computed-gotos' |
| on compilers that support it (notably: gcc, SunPro, icc), the bytecode |
| evaluation loop is compiled with a new dispatch mechanism which gives |
| speedups of up to 20%, depending on the system, on various benchmarks. |
| |
| - Issue #4874: Most builtin decoders now reject unicode input. |
| |
| - Issue #4842: Don't allow trailing 'L' when constructing an integer |
| from a string. |
| |
| - Issue #4991: os.fdopen now raises an OSError for invalid file descriptors. |
| |
| - Issue #4838: When a module is deallocated, free the memory backing the |
| optional module state data. |
| |
| - Issue #4910: Rename nb_long slot to nb_reserved, and change its |
| type to (void *). |
| |
| - Issue #4935: The overflow checking code in the expandtabs() method common |
| to str, bytes and bytearray could be optimized away by the compiler, letting |
| the interpreter segfault instead of raising an error. |
| |
| - Issue #3720: Fix a crash when an iterator modifies its class and removes its |
| __next__ method. |
| |
| - Issue #4910: Builtin int() function and PyNumber_Long/PyNumber_Int API |
| function no longer attempt to call the __long__ slot to convert an object |
| to an integer. Only the __int__ and __trunc__ slots are examined. |
| |
| - Issue #4893: Use NT threading on CE. |
| |
| - Issue #4915: Port sysmodule to Windows CE. |
| |
| - Issue #4868: utf-8, utf-16 and latin1 decoding are now 2x to 4x faster. The |
| common cases are optimized thanks to a dedicated fast path and a moderate |
| amount of loop unrolling. |
| |
| - Issue #4074: Change the criteria for doing a full garbage collection (i.e. |
| collecting the oldest generation) so that allocating lots of objects without |
| destroying them does not show quadratic performance. Based on a proposal by |
| Martin von Lรถwis at |
| http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2008-June/080579.html. |
| |
| - Issue #4604: Some objects of the I/O library could still be used after |
| having been closed (for instance, a read() call could return some |
| previously buffered data). Patch by Dmitry Vasiliev. |
| |
| - Issue #4705: Fix the -u ("unbuffered binary stdout and stderr") command-line |
| flag to work properly. Furthermore, when specifying -u, the text stdout |
| and stderr streams have line-by-line buffering enabled (the default being |
| to buffer arbitrary chunks of data). |
| |
| - The internal table, _PyLong_DigitValue, is now an array of unsigned chars |
| instead of ints (reducing its size from 4 to 8 times thereby reducing |
| Python's overall memory). |
| |
| - Issue #1180193: When importing a module from a .pyc (or .pyo) file with |
| an existing .py counterpart, override the co_filename attributes of all |
| code objects if the original filename is obsolete (which can happen if the |
| file has been renamed, moved, or if it is accessed through different paths). |
| Patch by Ziga Seilnacht and Jean-Paul Calderone. |
| |
| - Issue #4580: Fix slicing of memoryviews when the item size is greater than |
| one byte. Also fixes the meaning of len() so that it returns the number of |
| items, rather than the size in bytes. |
| |
| - Issue #4075: Use OutputDebugStringW in Py_FatalError. |
| |
| - Issue #4747: When the terminal does not use utf-8, executing a script with |
| non-ascii characters in its name could fail with a "SyntaxError: None" error. |
| |
| - Issue #4797: IOError.filename was not set when _fileio.FileIO failed to open |
| file with `bytes' filename on Windows. |
| |
| - Issue #3680: Reference cycles created through a dict, set or deque iterator |
| did not get collected. |
| |
| - Issue #4701: PyObject_Hash now implicitly calls PyType_Ready on types |
| where the tp_hash and tp_dict slots are both NULL. |
| |
| - Issue #4759: None is now allowed as the first argument of |
| bytearray.translate(). It was always allowed for bytes.translate(). |
| |
| - Added test case to ensure attempts to read from a file opened for writing |
| fail. |
| |
| - Issue #3106: Speedup some comparisons (str/str and int/int). |
| |
| - Issue #2183: Simplify and optimize bytecode for list, dict and set |
| comprehensions. Original patch for list comprehensions by Neal Norwitz. |
| |
| - Issue #2467: gc.DEBUG_STATS reported invalid elapsed times. Also, always |
| print elapsed times, not only when some objects are uncollectable / |
| unreachable. Original patch by Neil Schemenauer. |
| |
| - Issue #3439: Add a bit_length method to int. |
| |
| - Issue #2173: When getting device encoding, check that return value of |
| nl_langinfo is not the empty string. This was causing silent build |
| failures on OS X. |
| |
| - Issue #4597: Fixed several opcodes that weren't always propagating |
| exceptions. |
| |
| - Issue #4589: Fixed exception handling when the __exit__ function of a |
| context manager returns a value that cannot be converted to a bool. |
| |
| - Issue #4445: Replace "sizeof(PyBytesObject)" with |
| "offsetof(PyBytesObject, ob_sval) + 1" when allocating memory for |
| bytes instances. On a typical machine this saves 3 bytes of memory |
| (on average) per allocation of a bytes instance. |
| |
| - Issue #4533: File read operation was dreadfully slow due to a slowly |
| growing read buffer. Fixed by using the same growth rate algorithm as |
| Python 2.x. |
| |
| - Issue #4509: Various issues surrounding resize of bytearray objects to |
| which there are buffer exports (e.g. memoryview instances). |
| |
| - Issue #4233: Changed semantic of ``_fileio.FileIO``'s ``close()`` |
| method on file objects with closefd=False. The file descriptor is still |
| kept open but the file object behaves like a closed file. The ``FileIO`` |
| object also got a new readonly attribute ``closefd``. |
| |
| - Issue #4569: Interpreter crash when mutating a memoryview with an item size |
| larger than 1. |
| |
| - Issue #4748: Lambda generators no longer return a value. |
| |
| Library |
| ------- |
| |
| - Issue #4285: Change sys.version_info to be a named tuple. Patch by |
| Ross Light. |
| |
| - Issue #1520877: Now distutils.sysconfig reads $AR from the |
| environment/Makefile. Patch by Douglas Greiman. |
| |
| - Issue #1276768: The verbose option was not used in the code of |
| distutils.file_util and distutils.dir_util. |
| |
| - Issue #5132: Fixed trouble building extensions under Solaris with |
| --enabled-shared activated. Initial patch by Dave Peterson. |
| |
| - Issue #1581476: Always use the Tcl global namespace when calling into Tcl. |
| |
| - The shelve module now defaults to pickle protocol 3. |
| |
| - Fix a bug in the trace module where a bytes object from co_lnotab had its |
| items being passed through ord(). |
| |
| - Issue #2047: shutil.move() could believe that its destination path was |
| inside its source path if it began with the same letters (e.g. "src" vs. |
| "src.new"). |
| |
| - Added the ttk module. See issue #2983: Ttk support for Tkinter. |
| |
| - Removed isSequenceType(), isMappingType, and isNumberType() from the |
| operator module; use the abstract base classes instead. Also removed |
| the repeat() function; use mul() instead. |
| |
| - Issue 5021: doctest.testfile() did not create __name__ and |
| collections.namedtuple() relied on __name__ being defined. |
| |
| - Backport importlib from Python 3.1. Only the import_module() function has |
| been backported to help facilitate transitions from 2.7 to 3.1. |
| |
| - Issue #1885: distutils. When running sdist with --formats=tar,gztar |
| the tar file was overriden by the gztar one. |
| |
| - Issue #4863: distutils.mwerkscompiler has been removed. |
| |
| - Added a new itertools functions: combinations_with_replacement() |
| and compress(). |
| |
| - Fix and properly document the multiprocessing module's logging |
| support, expose the internal levels and provide proper usage |
| examples. |
| |
| - Issue #1672332: fix unpickling of subnormal floats, which was |
| producing a ValueError on some platforms. |
| |
| - Issue #3881: Help Tcl to load even when started through the |
| unreadable local symlink to "Program Files" on Vista. |
| |
| - Issue #4710: Extract directories properly in the zipfile module; |
| allow adding directories to a zipfile. |
| |
| - Issue #3807: _multiprocessing build fails when configure is passed |
| --without-threads argument. When this occurs, _multiprocessing will |
| be disabled, and not compiled. |
| |
| - Issue #5008: When a file is opened in append mode with the new IO library, |
| do an explicit seek to the end of file (so that e.g. tell() returns the |
| file size rather than 0). This is consistent with the behaviour of the |
| traditional 2.x file object. |
| |
| - Issue #5013: Fixed a bug in FileHandler which occurred when the delay |
| parameter was set. |
| |
| - Issue #4842: Always append a trailing 'L' when pickling longs using |
| pickle protocol 0. When reading, the 'L' is optional. |
| |
| - Add the importlib package. |
| |
| - Issue #4301: Patch the logging module to add processName support, remove |
| _check_logger_class from multiprocessing. |
| |
| - Issue #3325: Remove python2.x try: except: imports for old cPickle from |
| multiprocessing. |
| |
| - Issue #4959: inspect.formatargspec now works for keyword only arguments |
| without defaults. |
| |
| - Issue #3321: _multiprocessing.Connection() doesn't check handle; added checks |
| for *nix machines for negative handles and large int handles. Without this check |
| it is possible to segfault the interpreter. |
| |
| - Issue #4449: AssertionError in mp_benchmarks.py, caused by an underlying issue |
| in sharedctypes.py. |
| |
| - Issue #1225107: inspect.isclass() returned True for instances with a custom |
| __getattr__. |
| |
| - Issue #3826 and #4791: The socket module now closes the underlying socket |
| appropriately when it is being used via socket.makefile() objects |
| rather than delaying the close by waiting for garbage collection to do it. |
| |
| - Issue #1696199: Add collections.Counter() for rapid and convenient |
| counting. |
| |
| - Issue #3860: GzipFile and BZ2File now support the context manager protocol. |
| |
| - Issue #4867: Fixed a crash in ctypes when passing a string to a |
| function without defining argtypes. |
| |
| - Issue #4272: Add an optional argument to the GzipFile constructor to override |
| the timestamp in the gzip stream. The default value remains the current time. |
| The information can be used by e.g. gunzip when decompressing. Patch by |
| Jacques Frechet. |
| |
| - Restore Python 2.3 compatibility for decimal.py. |
| |
| - Issue #3638: Remove functions from _tkinter module level that depend on |
| TkappObject to work with multiple threads. |
| |
| - Issue #4718: Adapt the wsgiref package so that it actually works with |
| Python 3.x, in accordance with the `official amendments of the spec |
| <http://www.wsgi.org/wsgi/Amendments_1.0>`_. |
| |
| - Issue #4796: Added Decimal.from_float() and Context.create_decimal_from_float() |
| to the decimal module. |
| |
| - Fractions.from_float() no longer loses precision for integers too big to |
| cast as floats. |
| |
| - Issue #4812: add missing underscore prefix to some internal-use-only |
| constants in the decimal module. (Dec_0 becomes _Dec_0, etc.) |
| |
| - Issue 4790: The nsmallest() and nlargest() functions in the heapq module |
| did unnecessary work in the common case where no key function was specified. |
| |
| - Issue #4795: inspect.isgeneratorfunction() returns False instead of None when |
| the function is not a generator. |
| |
| - Issue #4702: Throwing a DistutilsPlatformError instead of IOError in case |
| no MSVC compiler is found under Windows. Original patch by Philip Jenvey. |
| |
| - Issue #4646: distutils was choking on empty options arg in the setup |
| function. Original patch by Thomas Heller. |
| |
| - Issue #3767: Convert Tk object to string in tkColorChooser. |
| |
| - Issue #3248: Allow placing ScrolledText in a PanedWindow. |
| |
| - Issue #4444: Allow assertRaises() to be used as a context handler, so that |
| the code under test can be written inline if more practical. |
| |
| - Issue #4739: Add pydoc help topics for symbols, so that e.g. help('@') |
| works as expected in the interactive environment. |
| |
| - Issue #4756: zipfile.is_zipfile() now supports file-like objects. Patch by |
| Gabriel Genellina. |
| |
| - Issue #4574: reading an UTF16-encoded text file crashes if \r on 64-char |
| boundary. |
| |
| - Issue #4223: inspect.getsource() will now correctly display source code |
| for packages loaded via zipimport (or any other conformant PEP 302 |
| loader). Original patch by Alexander Belopolsky. |
| |
| - Issue #4201: pdb can now access and display source code loaded via |
| zipimport (or any other conformant PEP 302 loader). Original patch by |
| Alexander Belopolsky. |
| |
| - Issue #4197: doctests in modules loaded via zipimport (or any other PEP |
| 302 conformant loader) will now work correctly in most cases (they |
| are still subject to the constraints that exist for all code running |
| from inside a module loaded via a PEP 302 loader and attempting to |
| perform IO operations based on __file__). Original patch by |
| Alexander Belopolsky. |
| |
| - Issues #4082 and #4512: Add runpy support to zipimport in a manner that |
| allows backporting to maintenance branches. Original patch by |
| Alexander Belopolsky. |
| |
| - Issue #4163: textwrap module: allow word splitting on a hyphen preceded by |
| a non-ASCII letter. |
| |
| - Issue #4616: TarFile.utime(): Restore directory times on Windows. |
| |
| - Issue #4021: tokenize.detect_encoding() now raises a SyntaxError when the |
| codec cannot be found. This is for compatibility with the builtin behavior. |
| |
| - Issue #4084: Fix max, min, max_mag and min_mag Decimal methods to |
| give correct results in the case where one argument is a quiet NaN |
| and the other is a finite number that requires rounding. |
| |
| - Issue #4483: _dbm module now builds on systems with gdbm & gdbm_compat |
| libs. |
| |
| - Added the subprocess.check_call_output() convenience function to get output |
| from a subprocess on success or raise an exception on error. |
| |
| - Issue #1055234: cgi.parse_header(): Fixed parsing of header parameters to |
| support unusual filenames (such as those containing semi-colons) in |
| Content-Disposition headers. |
| |
| - Issue #4384: Added logging integration with warnings module using |
| captureWarnings(). This change includes a NullHandler which does nothing; |
| it will be of use to library developers who want to avoid the "No handlers |
| could be found for logger XXX" message which can appear if the library user |
| doesn't configure logging. |
| |
| - Issue #3741: DISTUTILS_USE_SDK set causes msvc9compiler.py to raise an |
| exception. |
| |
| - Issue #4529: fix the parser module's validation of try-except-finally |
| statements. |
| |
| - Issue #4458: getopt.gnu_getopt() now recognizes a single "-" as an argument, |
| not a malformed option. |
| |
| - Added the subprocess.check_output() convenience function to get output |
| from a subprocess on success or raise an exception on error. |
| |
| - Issue #4542: On Windows, binascii.crc32 still accepted str as binary input; |
| the corresponding tests now pass. |
| |
| - Issue #4537: webbrowser.UnixBrowser would fail to open the browser because |
| it was calling the wrong open() function. |
| |
| - Issue #1055234: cgi.parse_header(): Fixed parsing of header parameters to |
| support unusual filenames (such as those containing semi-colons) in |
| Content-Disposition headers. |
| |
| - Issue #4861: ctypes.util.find_library(): Robustify. Fix library detection on |
| biarch systems. Try to rely on ldconfig only, without using objdump and gcc. |
| |
| Tools/Demos |
| ----------- |
| |
| - Ttk demos added in Demo/tkinter/ttk/ |
| |
| - Issue #4677: add two list comprehension tests to pybench. |
| |
| |
| Build |
| ----- |
| |
| - Issue #4494: Fix build with Py_NO_ENABLE_SHARED on Windows. |
| |
| - Issue #4895: Use _strdup on Windows CE. |
| |
| - Issue #4472: "configure --enable-shared" now works on OSX |
| |
| - Issues #4728 and #4060: WORDS_BIGEDIAN is now correct in Universal builds. |
| |
| - Issue #4389: Add icon to the uninstall entry in "add-and-remove-programs". |
| |
| - Issue #4289: Remove Cancel button from AdvancedDlg. |
| |
| - Issue #1656675: Register a drop handler for .py* files on Windows. |
| |
| - Issue #4120: Exclude manifest from extension modules in VS2008. |
| |
| - Issue #4091: Install pythonxy.dll in system32 again. |
| |
| - Issue #4018: Disable "for me" installations on Vista. |
| |
| - Issue #3758: Add ``patchcheck`` build target to .PHONY. |
| |
| - Issue #4204: Fixed module build errors on FreeBSD 4. |
| |
| |
| C-API |
| ----- |
| |
| - Issue #4720: The format for PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords can begin with '|'. |
| |
| - Issue #3632: from the gdb debugger, the 'pyo' macro can now be called when |
| the GIL is released, or owned by another thread. |
| |
| - Issue #4122: On Windows, fix a compilation error when using the |
| Py_UNICODE_ISSPACE macro in an extension module. |
| |
| |
| Extension Modules |
| ----------------- |
| |
| - Issue #4397: Fix occasional test_socket failure on OS X. |
| |
| - Issue #4279: Fix build of parsermodule under Cygwin. |
| |
| - Issue #4751: hashlib now releases the GIL when hashing large buffers |
| (with a hardwired threshold of 2048 bytes), allowing better parallelization |
| on multi-CPU systems. Contributed by Lukas Lueg (ebfe) and Victor Stinner. |
| |
| - Issue #4051: Prevent conflict of UNICODE macros in cPickle. |
| |
| - Issue #4738: Each zlib object now has a separate lock, allowing to compress |
| or decompress several streams at once on multi-CPU systems. Also, the GIL |
| is now released when computing the CRC of a large buffer. Patch by ebfe. |
| |
| - Issue #4228: Pack negative values the same way as 2.4 in struct's L format. |
| |
| - Issue #1040026: Fix os.times result on systems where HZ is incorrect. |
| |
| - Issues #3167, #3682: Fix test_math failures for log, log10 on Solaris, |
| OpenBSD. |
| |
| - Issue #4583: array.array would not always prohibit resizing when a buffer |
| has been exported, resulting in an interpreter crash when accessing the |
| buffer. |
| |
| |
| Tests |
| ----- |
| |
| - Issue #5083: New 'gui' resource for regrtest. |
| |
| |
| Docs |
| ---- |
| |
| |
| **(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)** |