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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
8================================
9
10*Release date: XXXX-XX-XX*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Martin v. Löwis729d47d2004-09-20 06:17:46 +000015- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +000016
17Extension modules
18-----------------
19
20...
21
22Library
23-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +000024
25- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +000026
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +000027- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
28 applications should use the getmember function.
29
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +000030- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
31
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +000032- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
33 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
34 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
35 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
36 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
37 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
38 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
39 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
40 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
41
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +000042- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
43 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +000044 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +000045
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +000046- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
47 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
48 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
49 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
50 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
51 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
52 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
53 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +000054
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +000055- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +000056 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
57 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
58 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
59 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
60 integration features instead. It would help if those were documented.
61
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +000062- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
63
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +000064Build
65-----
66
67...
68
69C API
70-----
71
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +000072- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
73 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
74 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +000075
76Documentation
77-------------
78
79...
80
81Tests
82-----
83
84- test__locale ported to unittest
85
86Windows
87-------
88
89...
90
91Mac
92---
93
94...
95
96New platforms
97-------------
98
99...
100
101Tools/Demos
102-----------
103
104...
105
106
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000107What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
108=================================
109
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000110*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000111
112Core and builtins
113-----------------
114
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000115- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000116 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
117
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000118- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
119 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
120 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
121 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
122 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
123 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
124 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
125 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000126 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
127 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
128 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
129 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
130 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000131
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000132- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
133 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
134 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
135 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
136 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
137
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000138- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
139
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000140- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
141 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
142
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000143- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
144 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
145 modified the list.
146
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000147- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
148 functions is now writable.
149
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000150- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
151 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
152 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
153 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
154
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000155- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
156 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
157 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
158 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
159 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000160
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000161- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
162 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
163
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000164Extension modules
165-----------------
166
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000167- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
168
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000169- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
170 data.
171
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000172- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
173 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
174 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
175 supposed to have been truncated away.
176
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000177- Added socket.socketpair().
178
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000179- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
180 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
181
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000182- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000183 versions of Python, have now been removed.
184
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000185Library
186-------
187
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000188- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000189 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000190
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000191- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
192 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
193
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000194- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
195 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
196
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000197- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
198
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000199- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
200 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000201
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000202- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
203 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
204
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000205- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
206
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000207- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
208
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000209- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
210
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000211- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
212 Percivall.
213
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000214- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
215 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
216
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000217- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
218 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
219 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000220 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000221
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000222- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
223 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
224 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
225 and exponent.
226
227- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
228
229- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
230 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
231 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
232
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000233- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
234 to the readline module.
235
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000236- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000237 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
238 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000239
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000240- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
241 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
242 contains symlinks.
243
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000244- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
245 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
246
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000247- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
248 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
249 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
250
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000251- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
252 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
253 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
254 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
255 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
256 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
257 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
258 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
259 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
260 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
261 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
262 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
263 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
264
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000265- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
266
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000267Tools/Demos
268-----------
269
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000270- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
271 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
272
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000273- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
274
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000275Build
276-----
277
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000278- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
279 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
280 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
281 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
282 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
283 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
284 plans to do so.
285
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000286- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
287 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
288
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000289- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
290 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
291
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000292- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
293 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
294
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000295- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
296 GNU/k*BSD systems.
297
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000298- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
299 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
300
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000301C API
302-----
303
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000304..
305
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000306Documentation
307-------------
308
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000309- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
310 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
311
312- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
313 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
314 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000315
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000316New platforms
317-------------
318
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000319- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
320
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000321Tests
322-----
323
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000324..
325
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000326Windows
327-------
328
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000329- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
330 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
331 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
332 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
333 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
334 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
335 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
336 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
337 the problem.
338
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000339Mac
340---
341
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000342..
343
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000344
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000345What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
346=================================
347
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000348*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000349
350Core and builtins
351-----------------
352
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000353- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
354 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
355 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
356 sensitive code.
357
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000358- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000359 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000360
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000361 @staticmethod
362 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000363
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000364 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000365
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000366- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
367 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
368 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
369 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
370 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
371 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
372 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
373 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
374 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
375 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
376 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
377
378 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
379 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
380 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
381 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
382 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
383 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
384 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
385
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000386- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
387 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
388
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000389- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000390 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000391
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000392- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000393 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000394 which was missing for no apparent reason.
395
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000396- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000397 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
398 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
399
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000400- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
401 types that support garbage collection.
402
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000403- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
404
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000405- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
406 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
407 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
408 Jython.
409
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000410- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
411
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000412- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
413 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
414
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000415- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
416 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
417 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000418
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000419- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
420 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
421 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
422
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000423Extension modules
424-----------------
425
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000426- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
427
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000428Library
429-------
430
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000431- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
432 TIS-620
433
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000434- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
435 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
436 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
437 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
438 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
439 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
440 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
441 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
442 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
443 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
444
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000445- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
446
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000447- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
448 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
449 same as when the argument is omitted).
450 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
451
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000452- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
453
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000454- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
455 schemes are offered.
456
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000457- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
458
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000459- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
460 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
461 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
462
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000463- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
464
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000465- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
466 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
467
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000468- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
469 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
470 when dummy_threading is being used.
471
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000472- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
473 from a tarfile.
474
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000475- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000476 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000477
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000478- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
479 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
480 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
481 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
482
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000483- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
484 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
485
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000486- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
487 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
488 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
489 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
490 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
491 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
492 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
493 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
494 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
495 by some other method in progress).
496
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000497- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
498 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
499 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000500
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000501- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
502
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000503- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
504 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
505 AM Kuchling.
506
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000507- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
508 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
509 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
510
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000511- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
512 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
513 instead of unsigned.
514
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000515- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000516 no longer part of the public API.
517
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000518- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
519 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
520 string methods of the same name).
521
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000522- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000523 SF patch 945642.
524
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000525- doctest unittest integration improvements:
526
527 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
528
529 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
530 DocTestSuites.
531
532- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
533 that provide thread-local data.
534
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000535- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
536 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
537
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000538- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
539
540- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
541 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
542 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
543
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000544- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
545
546 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
547 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
548 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000549
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000550 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
551 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
552 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
553 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
554
555 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
556 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
557
558 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
559 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
560 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
561 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
562
563 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
564 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
565 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
566 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
567 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
568
569 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
570 wrapping help output.
571
572 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
573 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
574 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000575
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000576C API
577-----
578
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000579- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
580 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
581 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
582 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
583 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
584 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
585 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
586 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
587 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
588 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
589 its visible semantics have not changed.
590
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000591- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
592 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
593
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000594Documentation
595-------------
596
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000597- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000598
599 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +0000600 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000601
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +0000602 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000603
604 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
605
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000606- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000607
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000608Tests
609-----
610
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000611- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000612 platforms that use the Makefile.
613
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000614- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
615 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
616 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
617
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000618
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000619What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
620=================================
621
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000622*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000623
624Core and builtins
625-----------------
626
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000627- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
628 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
629 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
630 objects now (one object instead of three).
631
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000632- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
633 Windows DLLs.
634
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +0000635- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
636 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000637
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000638- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
639 a new .pyc magic.
640
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000641- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
642 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
643 be there.
644
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000645- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
646 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
647 the LC_NUMERIC category.
648
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000649- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
650 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
651 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
652
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000653- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
654
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000655- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
656 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
657 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000658
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000659- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
660 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
661
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000662- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
663
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000664- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000665 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000666
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000667- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
668
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000669- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
670
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000671- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
672 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
673
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000674- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
675 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
676 Fixes bug #858016 .
677
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000678- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
679 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
680 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
681
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000682- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
683 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
684 improves their performance (about 35%).
685
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000686- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
687 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
688 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
689
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000690- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
691 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
692 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
693 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
694
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000695- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
696 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
697 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
698 length is not known).
699
700- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
701 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000702 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
703 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000704 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
705
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000706- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
707 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
708
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000709- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
710 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
711 keyword arguments.
712
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000713- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
714 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
715 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
716
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000717- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
718 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
719 cases.
720
721- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
722 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
723 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
724 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
725 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
726 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
727 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
728 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
729 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
730 a release build.
731
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000732- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
733 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
734
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000735- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000736 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000737
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000738- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
739 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
740 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
741 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
742 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
743 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
744 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
745 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
746 destroyed.
747
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000748- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
749 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
750 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
751 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
752 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
753 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
754 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
755 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
756
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000757- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
758 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
759 character other than a space.
760
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000761- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
762 by the function object or by the method object, the function
763 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
764 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
765 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
766 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
767 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
768 attributes with the same name.
769
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000770- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
771 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
772 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
773 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
774 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
775 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
776 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
777 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
778 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
779 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
780 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
781 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
782 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
783 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000784
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000785- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
786 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
787 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
788 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
789 This has been repaired.
790
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000791- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
792
793- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
794
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000795- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
796 over a sequence.
797
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000798- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000799 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000800
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000801- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
802
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000803- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
804 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
805 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
806 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
807 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
808 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
809 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
810 records with equal keys is unchanged).
811
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000812- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
813 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
814 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
815
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000816- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
817 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
818 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
819 freelist.
820
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000821- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
822 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
823
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000824- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
825 number.
826
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000827- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
828 a TypeError exception.
829
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000830- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
831 820195.
832
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000833- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
834 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
835 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
836
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000837- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000838 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
839 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000840
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000841- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
842 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
843 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
844
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000845- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
846 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000847 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000848
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000849- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000850 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
851 the first call.
852
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000853
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000854Extension modules
855-----------------
856
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000857- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
858 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
859
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000860- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
861 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
862 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
863 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
864 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
865 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
866 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000867
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000868- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
869
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000870- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
871
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000872- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
873 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
874
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000875- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
876 fewer false positives.
877
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000878- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
879 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
880
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000881- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000882 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
883
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000884- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000885 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000886 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +0000887 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
888 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000889
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000890- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
891 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
892 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
893 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
894
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000895- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
896 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
897 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
898 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
899 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
900 #897625.
901
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000902- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
903 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
904
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000905- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
906 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
907 and pops on either side of the deque.
908
909- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
910 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
911
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000912- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
913 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
914 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
915 other functions that expect a function argument.
916
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000917- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
918
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000919- os.getsid was added.
920
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000921- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
922 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
923 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
924
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000925- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
926
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000927- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
928
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000929- readline.clear_history was added.
930
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000931- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
932
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000933- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
934
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000935- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
936
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000937- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
938
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000939- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
940
941- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
942
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000943- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
944
945- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
946
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000947- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
948 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
949 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
950
951- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
952 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
953 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
954 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
955 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
956 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
957 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
958
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000959- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
960 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
961 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
962 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000963
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000964- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000965 iterators from a single iterable.
966
967- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
968 of raising a TypeError exception.
969
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000970- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
971 as parameter.
972
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000973Library
974-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000975
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +0000976- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
977 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
978 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000979
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +0000980- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
981 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
982 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +0000983
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +0000984- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +0000985
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +0000986- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
987 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +0000988
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +0000989- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
990 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
991
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000992- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
993
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000994- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000995 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000996
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000997- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000998 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000999
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001000- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1001
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001002- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1003 on cygwin and mingw32.
1004
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001005- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1006
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001007- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1008 module.
1009
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001010- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1011 installation scheme for all platforms.
1012
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001013- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001014 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001015
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001016- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1017 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1018 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1019
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001020- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1021 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1022 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1023
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001024- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1025
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001026- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1027
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001028- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1029 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1030
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001031- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1032 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1033 type pattern with the same value exists.
1034
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001035- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1036 when run from the command prompt).
1037
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001038- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1039 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1040
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001041- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1042 default sort).
1043
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001044- Added global runctx function to profile module
1045
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001046- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1047
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001048- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1049
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001050- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1051
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001052- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001053 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1054 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1055 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1056 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1057 accordingly.
1058
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001059- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1060 decoding standards.
1061
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001062- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1063 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1064 called for all requests.
1065
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001066- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1067 they are passed to the compiler.
1068
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001069- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1070 indent, width and depth.
1071
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001072- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1073 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1074
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001075- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1076 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1077
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001078- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1079
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001080- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1081
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001082- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1083
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001084- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1085 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1086
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001087- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001088 for better performance.
1089
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001090- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001091
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001092- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1093 a string).
1094
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001095- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1096
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001097- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1098
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001099- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1100
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001101- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1102
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001103- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1104 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1105 list of fieldnames.
1106
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001107- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1108 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1109
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001110- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1111
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001112- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1113 empty lists.
1114
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001115- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1116 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1117 and shelves.
1118
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001119- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1120 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1121
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001122- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001123 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1124 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001125
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001126- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1127 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001128 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001129
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001130- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001131 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1132 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1133
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001134- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1135 and removed in Py2.4.
1136
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001137- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1138
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001139- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1140
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001141Tools/Demos
1142-----------
1143
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001144- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1145 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1146
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001147- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1148
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001149- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1150 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1151 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1152 destination in situations where both files are given.
1153
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001154- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1155 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1156 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1157 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1158
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001159- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1160
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001161- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1162 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1163 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1164 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1165 now.
1166
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001167- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1168 in effect
1169
1170- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1171 C-c C-h
1172
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001173- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1174 -d option was given.
1175
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001176Build
1177-----
1178
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001179- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1180 build under OS X.
1181
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001182- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1183 --enable-profiling.
1184
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001185- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1186 is configured --with-tsc.
1187
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001188- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1189 on AMD64.
1190
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001191- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1192 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1193
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001194- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1195 removed.
1196
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001197- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1198 supported (see PEP 11).
1199
1200- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1201
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001202- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1203
1204- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1205 (see PEP 11).
1206
1207- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1208 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1209
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001210C API
1211-----
1212
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001213- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1214 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1215 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1216
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001217- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1218 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1219 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1220 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1221
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001222- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1223 generator objects.
1224
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001225- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1226 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001227 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1228 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001229
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001230- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1231 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1232
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001233- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1234 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1235 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1236 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1237 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1238
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001239- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1240 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1241 about 10% faster.
1242
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001243- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1244 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1245
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001246- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1247 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1248 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1249 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1250
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001251Windows
1252-------
1253
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001254- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1255 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1256 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1257 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1258
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001259- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1260 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1261 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1262
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001263
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001264What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1265===============================
1266
1267*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1268
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001269IDLE
1270----
1271
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001272- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1273 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1274 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1275 context-menu actions.
1276
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001277- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1278 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1279 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1280 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1281 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1282 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1283 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1284 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1285 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1286
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001287
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001288What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1289=============================================
1290
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001291*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001292
1293Core and builtins
1294-----------------
1295
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001296- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001297 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001298 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1299
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001300Extension modules
1301-----------------
1302
1303- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1304 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1305 than once. This has been fixed.
1306
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001307- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1308 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1309 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1310 call.
1311
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001312- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1313
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001314Library
1315-------
1316
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001317- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1318 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1319
1320- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1321 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1322 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1323 restored.
1324
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001325IDLE
1326----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001327
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001328- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001329
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001330Build
1331-----
1332
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001333- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1334 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1335
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001336C API
1337-----
1338
1339Windows
1340-------
1341
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001342- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1343 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1344
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001345- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1346
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001347Mac
1348---
1349
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001350- Various fixes to pimp.
1351
1352- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1353
1354- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1355 more problems than it solves.
1356
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001357
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001358What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1359=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001360
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001361*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1362
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001363Core and builtins
1364-----------------
1365
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001366- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1367 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1368
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001369- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1370 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001371 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001372
1373- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1374 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1375 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001376 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001377
1378- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1379 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001380
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001381- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1382 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1383 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1384
1385- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001386 770247.
1387
1388- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001389
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001390Extension modules
1391-----------------
1392
1393- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1394 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1395
1396- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1397
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001398- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1399
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001400- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1401 contained within the _strptime module.
1402
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001403- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1404 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1405
1406- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001407 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1408
1409- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1410 the find_class attribute, if present.
1411
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001412- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001413
1414 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1415 (SF bug 763298).
1416
1417 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001418 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1419 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1420 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001421
1422 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1423
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001424Library
1425-------
1426
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001427- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1428
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001429- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1430 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1431 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1432 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1433 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1434 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1435 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1436 or Tester().
1437
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001438- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1439 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1440 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1441 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1442 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1443 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1444 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1445 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1446 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001447
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001448 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001449
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001450- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1451 weren't before was an oversight.
1452
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001453- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1454 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1455
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001456- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1457 when there are no lines.
1458
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001459- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1460 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1461
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001462- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1463 to child processes.
1464
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001465- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1466
1467- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1468
1469- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1470 xmlrpclib.
1471
1472- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1473 responses.
1474
1475- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1476 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1477
1478- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1479 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1480 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1481
1482- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1483 used as patterns.
1484
1485- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1486 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1487 than Tk 8.3.
1488
1489- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1490
1491- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001492
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001493Tools/Demos
1494-----------
1495
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001496- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1497
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001498- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1499
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001500- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001501
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001502Build
1503-----
1504
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001505- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1506
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001507- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1508
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001509- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1510 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001511
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001512- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1513 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1514 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001515
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001516C API
1517-----
1518
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001519- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1520 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1521
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001522Windows
1523-------
1524
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001525- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1526 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1527 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1528 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1529 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1530 Python exception ::
1531
1532 thread.error: can't start new thread
1533
1534 is raised now.
1535
1536- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1537 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1538 instead of from DLL teardown.
1539
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001540Mac
1541---
1542
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001543- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001544 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001545 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1546 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1547 the executable in the bundle.
1548
1549- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001550
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001551- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1552
1553- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1554 on Panther.
1555
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001556What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1557================================
1558
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001559*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001560
1561Core and builtins
1562-----------------
1563
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001564- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1565 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1566 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1567 with the -i option.
1568
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001569- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1570 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1571
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001572- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1573 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1574
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001575- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1576 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1577 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1578 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1579 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1580 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1581 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1582 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1583 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1584 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1585 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1586 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1587 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001588
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001589- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1590 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1591 embedded in a lambda expression.
1592
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001593- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1594 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1595 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1596 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1597 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1598
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001599- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1600 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1601 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1602
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001603- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1604 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1605
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001606- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1607 It's writable again.
1608
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001609- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1610 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1611 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001612 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001613
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001614- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1615 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1616 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1617
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001618Extension modules
1619-----------------
1620
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001621- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1622 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1623
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001624- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1625 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1626 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1627 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1628
1629- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1630 collection.
1631
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001632- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1633 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1634 unique within a single program run.
1635
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001636- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1637 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1638
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001639- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1640 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1641
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001642- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1643 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001644
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001645- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1646
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001647- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1648 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1649
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001650- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1651 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1652 for many BSD-derived systems.
1653
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001654
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001655Library
1656-------
1657
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001658- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1659 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1660 primary ones:
1661
1662 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1663 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1664 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1665
1666 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1667 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1668 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1669 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1670 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1671 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1672
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001673- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1674 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1675 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1676 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1677 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1678 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1679 argument.
1680
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001681- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1682 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1683 in the archive.
1684
1685- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1686 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1687
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001688- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1689 569574).
1690
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001691- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1692 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1693 no more.
1694
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001695- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1696 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1697 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1698 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1699 code coverage.
1700
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001701- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1702 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1703 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001704 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1705 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001706
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001707- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1708 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1709 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001710 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001711
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001712- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1713
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001714- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1715 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1716 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1717 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1718
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001719- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1720 handling.
1721
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001722- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1723 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1724
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001725- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1726 in socket.py.
1727
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001728- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1729
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001730- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1731 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1732 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1733 opener with proxy support.
1734
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001735- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1736
1737- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1738
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001739Tools/Demos
1740-----------
1741
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001742- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1743
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001744- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1745
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001746- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1747 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001748
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001749- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1750 files.
1751
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001752Build
1753-----
1754
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001755- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001756 different root directory.
1757
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001758C API
1759-----
1760
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001761- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1762 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1763 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1764 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1765 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1766 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1767 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1768 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1769 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1770 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1771
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001772- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1773 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1774 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1775 from Python.
1776
1777
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001778New platforms
1779-------------
1780
1781None this time.
1782
1783Tests
1784-----
1785
1786- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1787 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1788
1789Windows
1790-------
1791
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001792- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1793
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001794- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1795 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1796 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1797 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1798 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1799 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1800 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1801 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1802 that's what it's for.
1803
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001804Mac
1805---
1806
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001807- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1808 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1809 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1810 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001811- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1812 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1813- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001814
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001815SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1816------------------------------------
1817
1818430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1819598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1820622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1821661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1822683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1823697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1824713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1825724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1826727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1827729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1828730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1829731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1830732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1831733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1832735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1833740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1834744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1835745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1836747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1837749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1838751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1839753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1840755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1841757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1842760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1843
1844
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001845What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1846================================
1847
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001848*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001849
1850Core and builtins
1851-----------------
1852
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001853- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1854 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1855
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001856- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1857 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1858 and cannot be strings).
1859
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001860- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1861 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1862 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1863 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1864
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001865- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1866 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1867 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1868 Python itself.
1869
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001870- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1871 the referenced object, if it has one.
1872
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001873- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1874 the thread started at
1875 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1876
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001877- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1878 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1879 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1880 placed on a list index.
1881
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001882- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1883 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1884 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1885 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1886
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001887- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1888 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1889 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1890 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1891 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1892 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1893 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1894
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001895- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1896 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1897 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1898 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1899 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1900
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001901- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1902 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001903
1904- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1905 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1906 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1907 #693195.)
1908
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001909- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1910 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001911
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001912- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001913 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001914 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1915 interpreter executions, would fail.
1916
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001917- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001918 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001919 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001920
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001921Extension modules
1922-----------------
1923
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001924- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1925 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1926 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1927 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1928
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001929- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1930 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1931
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001932- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1933 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1934 and Greg Chapman.)
1935
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001936- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1937 recursively.
1938
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001939- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001940 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1941 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1942 leaks.
1943
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001944- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1945
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001946- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1947 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1948 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1949 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1950 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1951 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1952 #705836.
1953
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001954- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001955 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1956
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001957- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1958 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1959 See SF bug #692416.
1960
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001961- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1962 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1963
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001964- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1965 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1966 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001967
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001968- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001969 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1970 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1971
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001972- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1973 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1974 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1975 timeouts to work properly.
1976
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001977Library
1978-------
1979
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001980- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1981 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1982 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1983 future release.
1984
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001985- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1986 for querying platform dependent features.
1987
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001988- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001989
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001990- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1991 pickle protocol versions.
1992
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001993- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1994 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1995 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1996
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001997- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1998
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001999- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2000 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2001 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2002 modules.
2003
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002004- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2005 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2006 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2007
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002008- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2009 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2010
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002011- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2012 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2013 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2014
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002015- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002016 MS Office extensions.
2017
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002018- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2019 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2020
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002021- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2022 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2023
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002024- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2025 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2026 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2027 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2028 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2029 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2030
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002031- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2032 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2033 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002034
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002035- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2036 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2037 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2038
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002039- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2040
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002041- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2042 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2043 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2044
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002045Tools/Demos
2046-----------
2047
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002048- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2049 See the module docstring for details.
2050
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002051Build
2052-----
2053
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002054- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2055 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002056
2057C API
2058-----
2059
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002060- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2061
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002062- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2063 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2064 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2065
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002066- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2067 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002068
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002069 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2070 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2071 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002072
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002073- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002074 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2075
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002076- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2077 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2078 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002079
2080New platforms
2081-------------
2082
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002083None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002084
2085Tests
2086-----
2087
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002088- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2089 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002090
2091Windows
2092-------
2093
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002094- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2095 function.
2096
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002097- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2098 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002099
2100Mac
2101---
2102
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002103- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2104 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002105
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002106- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2107 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002108
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002109- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2110 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2111 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002112
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002113- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002114 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2115 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002116
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002117- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2118 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002119
2120
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002121What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2122=================================
2123
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002124*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002125
2126Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002127-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002128
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002129- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2130 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2131 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2132
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002133- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2134 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2135 (SF patch #664376.)
2136
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002137- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2138 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2139 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2140 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2141 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2142 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002143 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002144
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002145- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2146 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2147 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2148 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002149 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002150
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002151- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2152 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2153 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2154 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2155 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2156 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2157 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2158 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2159 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2160 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2161 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2162
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002163- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2164 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2165 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2166 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2167 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2168 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2169
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002170- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2171 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2172
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002173- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2174 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2175 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2176 case.)
2177
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002178- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2179 passed as unicode strings.
2180
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002181- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2182 See SF bug #683467.
2183
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002184- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2185 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2186
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002187- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2188
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002189- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2190
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002191- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2192 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2193 arguments.
2194
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002195- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2196 See SF bug #667147.
2197
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002198- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002199 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002200 See SF bug #676155.
2201
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002202- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002203 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002204 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2205 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2206 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2207 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2208 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2209 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002210
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002211Extension modules
2212-----------------
2213
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002214- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2215 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2216 tp_as_number pointer.
2217
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002218- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2219 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2220 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2221 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2222 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2223
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002224- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2225
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002226- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2227
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002228- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002229 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002230 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2231 patch #678531.)
2232
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002233- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2234 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2235
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002236- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2237 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2238
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002239- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2240
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002241- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2242 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2243 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2244
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002245- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2246
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002247- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2248 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2249
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002250- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002251
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002252- datetime changes:
2253
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002254 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2255
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002256 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2257 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2258 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2259 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2260 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2261 now.
2262
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002263 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002264 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2265 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002266
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002267 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002268 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002269 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2270 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2271 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2272 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002273
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002274 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2275 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2276 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002277 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2278
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002279 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2280 by a later example coded by Guido.
2281
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002282 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002283 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2284 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2285 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002286 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2287 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2288
2289 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2290 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2291 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2292 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2293 tzinfo subclass instance.
2294
2295 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2296 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2297 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2298 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2299 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2300 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2301 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2302 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002303
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002304 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2305 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2306 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2307 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2308 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002309 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2310
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002311 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002312
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002313 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2314 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2315 as a naive datetime object.
2316
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002317 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2318 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2319 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2320
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002321 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2322 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2323 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2324 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2325 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2326 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2327 comparison.
2328
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002329 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2330 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2331 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2332 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002333 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002334
2335 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002336
2337 and ::
2338
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002339 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2340
2341 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2342 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2343 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2344 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2345
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002346 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2347 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2348 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2349 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2350 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2351
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002352 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2353 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002354 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2355 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002356
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002357Library
2358-------
2359
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002360- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2361 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2362
2363- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2364 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2365 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2366 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2367 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2368 See PEP 307 for details.
2369
2370- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2371 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2372
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002373- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2374 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002375 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002376 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2377 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002378 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002379
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002380- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2381 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2382
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002383- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2384 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2385 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2386
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002387- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2388
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002389- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2390 exception.
2391
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002392- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2393 class.
2394
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002395- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2396 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2397 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2398
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002399- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2400 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2401
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002402- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002403 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2404 See SF bug #659228.
2405
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002406- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2407 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2408 See SF patch #651082.
2409
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002410- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002411
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002412- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2413 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2414
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002415- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002416 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002417
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002418- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2419 DOS paths from other platforms.
2420
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002421Tools/Demos
2422-----------
2423
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002424- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2425 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2426 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2427 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2428 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2429 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2430 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2431 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2432 example:
2433
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002434 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2435 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002436
2437 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2438
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002439
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002440Build
2441-----
2442
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002443- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2444 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2445 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002446 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2447
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002448 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2449
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002450- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2451 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2452 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2453 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2454 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2455 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2456 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2457 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2458 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2459
2460- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2461 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2462 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2463 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2464
2465- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2466 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2467
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002468C API
2469-----
2470
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002471- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2472 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002473
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002474- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2475 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2476 tp_as_number pointer.
2477
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002478- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2479 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2480 (SF #681367)
2481
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002482- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2483 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2484 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2485 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002486
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002487Tests
2488-----
2489
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002490- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002491 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2492 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2493 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2494 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2495 pydoc.)
2496
2497- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2498
2499- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002500
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002501Windows
2502-------
2503
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002504- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2505 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2506 time).
2507
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002508- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2509 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2510
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002511- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2512 release without strong cryptography.
2513
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002514- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002515 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002516
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002517- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2518 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2519
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002520Mac
2521---
2522
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002523- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2524 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002525
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002526- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2527 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2528 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002529
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002530- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2531 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002532
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002533- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2534 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2535 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2536 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002537
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002538- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002539 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2540 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2541 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002542
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002543
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002544What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002545=================================
2546
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002547*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002548
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002549Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002550--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002551
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002552- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2553
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002554- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2555 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002556 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002557 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002558 a different meaning than before.
2559
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002560- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002561 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002562 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002563
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002564- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002565 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002566 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002567
2568- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2569 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2570 and deallocation.
2571
2572- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2573 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2574
2575- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2576 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2577 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2578 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2579 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2580
2581- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2582 now detected by the garbage collector.
2583
2584- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2585 [SF bug 519621]
2586
2587- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2588 identifier.
2589
2590- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2591 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2592 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2593 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2594 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2595 [SF bug 563060]
2596
2597- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2598 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2599 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2600 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2601 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2602
2603- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2604 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2605 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2606
2607- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2608
2609- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2610 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2611 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2612 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2613 state of the slots would be lost.)
2614
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002615Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002616-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002617
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002618- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002619 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2620 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2621 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2622 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002623 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2624 Jython 2.1.
2625
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002626- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002627 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002628 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2629 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2630 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2631 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2632 these, see PEP 302.
2633
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002634- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2635 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2636 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2637
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002638- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2639 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2640 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2641
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002642- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2643 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2644 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2645
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002646- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2647 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2648 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2649 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2650 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2651 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2652 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2653 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2654 releases or implementations.
2655
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002656- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002657 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2658 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002659
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002660- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2661 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2662
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002663- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2664 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2665 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2666
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002667- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2668 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2669
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002670- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2671 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002672 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2673 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002674
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002675- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2676 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2677 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2678 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2679 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2680
2681 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2682 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2683 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2684 pattern.
2685
2686 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2687 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2688 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2689 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2690
2691 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2692 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2693 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2694 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2695 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2696 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2697
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002698- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2699 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2700 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2701 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2702 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2703 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2704 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2705 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002706
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002707- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2708 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2709 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2710 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2711 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002712 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2713 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2714 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2715 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2716 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2717 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2718 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002719
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002720- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2721 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2722
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002723- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2724 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2725 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2726 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2727 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2728 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2729 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2730 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2731 to Zack Weinberg!
2732
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002733- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2734 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2735 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2736 type. This has been fixed now.
2737
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002738- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2739 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2740 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2741
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002742- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2743 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2744 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2745 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2746 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2747 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2748 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2749 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002750 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002751
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002752- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2753 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2754 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002755
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002756- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2757 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2758 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2759 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2760 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2761 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2762 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2763 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002764 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002765 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2766 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2767
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002768- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2769 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2770 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2771 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2772 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2773 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2774 this.)
2775
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002776- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2777 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002778 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002779 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002780 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2781 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002782 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2783 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002784
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002785- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2786 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2787 currently running.
2788
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002789- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2790 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2791 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2792 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2793
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002794- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2795 as directory names.
2796
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002797- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2798 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2799
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002800- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2801 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2802
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002803- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002804 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2805 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002806
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002807- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2808 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2809 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2810 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2811 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2812
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002813- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2814 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2815 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2816 removed.
2817
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002818- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2819 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2820 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2821
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002822- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2823 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2824 to __debug__.
2825
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002826- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2827 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2828 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2829
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002830- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2831 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2832 deprecated now.
2833
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002834- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2835 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2836 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002837
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002838- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2839 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2840 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2841 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2842 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002843
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002844- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2845 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2846
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002847- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2848 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2849 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002850 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002851 is backward compatible.
2852
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002853- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2854 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2855 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2856 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2857 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2858
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002859- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2860 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2861 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2862 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2863 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2864 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002865
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002866- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2867 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2868
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002869- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2870 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2871
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002872- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2873 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2874 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2875 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2876 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2877
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002878- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2879 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2880 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2881
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002882- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002883 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2884
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002885- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2886 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2887 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002888
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002889- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2890 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2891
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002892- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2893 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2894 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2895
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002896- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2897
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002898Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002899-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002900
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002901- Added three operators to the operator module:
2902 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2903 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2904 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2905
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002906- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2907
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002908- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2909 archives.
2910
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002911- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2912 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2913 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2914
2915 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2916
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002917- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2918 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2919 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002920 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002921
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002922- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2923 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2924 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2925 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002926 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2927 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2928 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2929 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002930
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002931- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2932 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002933
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002934- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2935
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002936- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2937 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2938
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002939- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2940 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2941 supported.
2942
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002943- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2944
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002945- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2946 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002947
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002948- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2949 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2950
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002951- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2952
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002953- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2954 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2955
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002956- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2957 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2958 functions but callable type objects.
2959
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002960- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002961 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002962 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002963
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002964- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2965 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002966
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002967- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2968 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002969
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002970- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2971 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2972 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2973 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2974
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002975- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2976 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002977
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002978- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2979 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2980 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2981 and __imul__.
2982
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002983- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002984 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2985 is called.
2986
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002987- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2988 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2989 interpreter was compiled.
2990
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002991- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2992 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2993 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002994 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002995 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2996 1, not 2.
2997
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002998- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2999 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3000 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3001 limit.
3002
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003003- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3004 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3005 bug #623464.
3006
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003007- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3008 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3009 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3010 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3011
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003012Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003013-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003014
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003015- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3016
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003017- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3018 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3019 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3020 with Python 2.3a2.
3021
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003022- os.path exposes getctime.
3023
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003024- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003025 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003026 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003027 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003028 unit tests of floating point results.
3029
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003030- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3031 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3032 has been increased.
3033
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003034- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3035 executed.
3036
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003037- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3038 postinstallation script.
3039
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003040- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3041 test the current module.
3042
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003043- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003044 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3045 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3046 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3047 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3048
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003049- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003050 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003051 Ward's Optik package.
3052
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003053- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3054 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3055 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3056 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3057
3058- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3059 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003060 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003061
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003062- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3063 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3064 shelf are binary pickles.
3065
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003066- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3067 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3068
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003069- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3070 modules are iterators now.
3071
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003072- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3073 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3074 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3075 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3076 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3077 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003078
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003079- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3080 with their entity value.
3081
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003082- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3083
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003084- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3085 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003086
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003087- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3088 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003089 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003090
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003091- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3092 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3093 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3094 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3095 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3096 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3097 main():
3098
3099 import locale
3100 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3101
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003102- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3103 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3104
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003105- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3106 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3107 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3108 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3109 to the new standard.
3110
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003111- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3112 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3113 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3114 an extension to the database.
3115
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003116- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3117 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3118 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3119 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003120 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003121
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003122- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003123 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003124
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003125- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3126 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3127 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3128 bounded integers.
3129
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003130- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3131 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3132 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3133 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3134 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3135 in existence.
3136
3137 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3138 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3139 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3140 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3141 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3142 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3143
3144 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3145 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3146 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3147 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3148
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003149- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3150 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3151 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3152
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003153- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3154
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003155- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3156 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3157 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3158 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3159
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003160- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3161 argument.
3162
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003163- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3164 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3165 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3166 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3167 [SF patch 560794].
3168
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003169- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3170 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3171 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003172 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3173 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3174 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003175
3176- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3177 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003178
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003179- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3180 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3181 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3182 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003183
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003184- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3185 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3186 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3187 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3188 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3189
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003190- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003191
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003192- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3193
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003194- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3195 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3196 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3197 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3198 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3199 identical to None.
3200
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003201- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3202 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3203 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3204 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3205 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3206 results now.
3207
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003208- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3209 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3210
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003211- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3212 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3213 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3214 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3215 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3216 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3217 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3218 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3219
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003220- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3221
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003222- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3223 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3224
3225- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3226 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3227 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3228 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3229 and other systems.
3230
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003231- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3232 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3233 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3234 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 +00003235 work well with these.
3236
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003237- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3238
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003239- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003240 connections.
3241
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003242- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3243 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3244 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3245
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003246- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3247 sets
3248
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003249- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3250 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3251 name.
3252
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003253- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3254 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3255 passed in.
3256
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003257- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003258 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003259 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3260 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003261
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003262- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3263
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003264- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3265
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003266- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3267 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3268 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3269
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003270- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3271 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3272 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3273 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003274 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003275
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003276- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003277 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003278 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003279
3280- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3281 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3282 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3283
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003284- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003285 the value of its expression argument.
3286
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003287- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3288 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3289 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3290
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003291- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3292 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3293 skipstone browser was included.
3294
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003295- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3296 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3297
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003298Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003299-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003300
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003301- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3302 names in addition to accepting file names.
3303
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003304- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3305 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3306 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3307 still used and useful.)
3308
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003309- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3310 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3311 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3312 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003313
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003314- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3315 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3316 the generated binary.
3317
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003318Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003319-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003320
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003321- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3322
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003323- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3324 except in the hands of experts.
3325
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003326- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003327 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3328 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3329 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003330
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003331- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3332 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3333 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3334 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3335 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3336 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3337 builds.
3338
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003339- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3340 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3341 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3342 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3343 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3344 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3345 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3346 new type.
3347
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003348- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003349
3350 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3351 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3352 positive infinities.
3353
3354 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3355 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3356 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3357 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3358 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3359 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3360 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3361
3362 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3363
3364 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3365
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003366- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3367 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3368 size of the executable.
3369
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003370- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3371 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3372 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3373 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003374
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003375- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3376
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003377- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3378 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3379 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003380
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003381- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3382 well as Unix.
3383
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003384- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3385 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3386 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3387 modules in the README file for details.
3388
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003389C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003390-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003391
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003392- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3393 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003394 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003395 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003396 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003397
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003398- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3399 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3400 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3401 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3402 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3403 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003404 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003405 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3406 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3407 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3408 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3409 aligned.)
3410
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003411- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3412 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3413 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3414
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003415- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3416 level.
3417
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003418- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3419 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3420 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3421 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3422 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3423
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003424- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3425 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3426 code.
3427
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003428- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3429 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3430 adjusting for negative indices.
3431
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003432- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3433 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3434 object.
3435
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003436- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3437 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3438 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3439
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003440- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3441 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003442
3443- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3444
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003445- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3446 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3447 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3448 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3449
3450- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3451
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003452- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003453
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003454- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003455 without going through the buffer API.
3456
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003457- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003458
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003459- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3460 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3461 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3462 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3463
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003464- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3465 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3466
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003467- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003468 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3469
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003470New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003471-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003472
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003473- OpenVMS is now supported.
3474
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003475- AtheOS is now supported.
3476
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003477- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3478
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003479- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3480
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003481Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003482-----
3483
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003484- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3485 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3486 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003487
3488Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003489-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003490
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003491- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3492 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3493 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3494 bugs.
3495 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003496 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003497 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3498 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003499 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003500
3501- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003502 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003503
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003504- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3505 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3506
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003507- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3508 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003509 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003510 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3511
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003512- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3513 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3514 use files" uninstall option).
3515
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003516- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3517
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003518- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3519 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3520
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003521- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3522 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3523 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3524
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003525- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3526 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3527 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3528 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3529 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003530 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3531 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3532 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003533
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003534- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003535 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003536 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3537 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3538 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3539 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3540 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3541 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3542 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3543 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3544 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3545 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3546 work around.
3547
3548- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3549 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3550 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3551 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3552 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3553 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3554 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3555 specified with O_CREAT too).
3556
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003557Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003558----
3559
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003560- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003561
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003562- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3563 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3564 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3565
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003566- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3567 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3568 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3569
3570- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3571 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3572 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3573 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3574 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3575 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3576 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3577 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003578
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003579- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3580 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3581 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003582
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003583- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3584 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3585 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3586 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3587 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003588
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003589- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3590 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3591 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003592
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003593- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3594 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003595
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003596- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3597 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3598 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3599 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3600 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003601
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003602- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3603 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3604 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3605
3606- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3607 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3608 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003609
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003610- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3611 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3612 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3613 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003614 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003615
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003616- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3617 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003618
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003619- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3620 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003621
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003622- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003623 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003624 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3625 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003626
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003627
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003628What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003629===============================
3630
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003631*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3632
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003633Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003634--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003635
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003636- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3637 with a custom metaclass.
3638
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003639Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003640-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003641
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003642- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3643 are proxies.
3644
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003645Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003646-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003647
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003648- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3649 very short strings.
3650
3651- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3652 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3653 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3654 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3655 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3656
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003657Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003658-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003659
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003660- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3661 close or delete time).
3662
3663- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3664 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3665
3666- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3667
3668- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003669 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003670
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003671Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003672-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003673
3674Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003675-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003676
3677C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003678-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003679
3680New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003681-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003682
3683Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003684-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003685
3686Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003687-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003688
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003689- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3690
3691- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3692 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3693
3694- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3695 deleted at process exit time.
3696
3697- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3698 in backslash.
3699
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003700Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003701----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003702
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003703- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3704 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3705 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3706
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003707
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003708What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003709===========================
3710
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003711*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3712
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003713Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003714--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003715
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003716- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3717 been extensively updated. See
3718
3719 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3720
3721 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3722
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003723- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3724 deleted!
3725
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003726- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3727 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3728 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3729 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3730 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3731
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003732- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3733
3734 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3735 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3736
3737 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3738 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3739 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3740 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3741 supported anyway.
3742
3743 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3744 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3745
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003746- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3747 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3748 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3749 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3750 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003751
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003752- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3753 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3754 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3755
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003756Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003757-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003758
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003759- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3760 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3761 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3762 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3763 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3764 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003765 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3766 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3767 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3768 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003769
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003770- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3771 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3772 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3773
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003774Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003775-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003776
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003777- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3778
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003779Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003780-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003781
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003782- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3783 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3784 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3785 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3786 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3787 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3788
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003789- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3790
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003791- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3792
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003793- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3794
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003795- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3796 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3797 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3798
3799- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3800
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003801Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003802-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003803
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003804- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3805 off a search on Google.
3806
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003807Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003808-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003809
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003810- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3811 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3812 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3813 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3814 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3815 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3816 other platforms should do likewise.
3817
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003818- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3819 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3820 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3821
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003822C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003823-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003824
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003825- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3826 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3827 producing key-value pairs.
3828
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003829- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003830 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003831 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3832 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3833 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3834 previously went unchallenged.
3835
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003836New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003837-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003838
3839Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003840-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003841
3842Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003843-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003844
3845Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003846----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003847
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003848- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3849 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003850
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003851- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3852 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3853 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3854 home.
3855
3856
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003857What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003858===========================
3859
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003860*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3861
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003862Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003863--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003864
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003865- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3866 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003867
3868 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003869 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003870
3871 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3872 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003873 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003874 This needs to be documented.
3875
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003876- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3877 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3878
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003879- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3880 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3881 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3882
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003883- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3884 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3885
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003886- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3887 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3888 class forbids it).
3889
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003890- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3891 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3892 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3893
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003894- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3895
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003896Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003897-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003898
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003899- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3900 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003901 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003902
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003903- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3904 (like 1 + '').
3905
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003906Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003907-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003908
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003909- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3910 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3911 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3912 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003913 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003914 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3915
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003916- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3917 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3918 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3919 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3920
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003921- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3922 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003923 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3924 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3925 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003926
3927- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3928 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003929
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003930- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3931 bytes on its input.
3932
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003933Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003934-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003935
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003936- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003937 convenience function.
3938
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003939- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3940 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3941 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003942 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3943 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3944 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3945 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3946 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3947 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003948
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003949- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3950 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3951 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3952 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3953
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003954- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3955 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3956 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3957
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003958- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3959 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3960 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3961 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3962
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003963- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3964 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003965 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003966 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3967 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3968 new -l and -e options.
3969
3970- statcache is now deprecated.
3971
3972- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3973 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003974 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003975 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3976 time properly taken into account.
3977
3978- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3979 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3980 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3981 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3982
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003983Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003984-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003985
3986Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003987-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003988
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003989- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3990 is built with libdb3 if available.
3991
3992- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3993
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003994C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003995-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003996
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003997- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3998 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3999 PySequence_Size().
4000
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004001- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4002
4003- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4004 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4005 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4006
4007- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4008 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4009
4010- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4011 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4012
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004013New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004014-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004015
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004016- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4017 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4018
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004019- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4020 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4021
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004022- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4023
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004024Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004025-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004026
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004027- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4028 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4029
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004030Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004031-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004032
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004033Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004034----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004035
4036- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4037 removed completely in the next release.
4038
4039- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4040 OSX.
4041
4042- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4043 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4044
4045- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4046
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004047
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004048What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004049===========================
4050
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004051*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4052
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004053Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004054--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004055
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004056- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004057 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004058 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004059 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4060 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004061 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4062 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004063 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4064 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004065
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004066- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4067 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4068
4069- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4070 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4071
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004072Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004073-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004074
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004075- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4076 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4077 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4078 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4079 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4080 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4081 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4082 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4083
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004084- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4085 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4086 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4087 example).
4088
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004089- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004090 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004091 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004092 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004093
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004094- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4095 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4096 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004097 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004098
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004099- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4100 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4101 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4102 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4103 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4104 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4105
4106 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4107
4108 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4109
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004110Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004111-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004112
4113- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4114
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004115- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4116
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004117- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4118 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004119
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004120- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4121 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4122 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4123 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4124 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4125 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004126 attributes.
4127
4128- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4129 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4130 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004131
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004132- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4133 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4134 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004135
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004136- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4137 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4138 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004139 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4140 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4141
4142- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4143 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004144
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004145Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004146-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004147
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004148- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4149 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4150
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004151- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4152 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4153 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4154 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4155
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004156- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4157 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4158 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4159 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4160
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004161 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4162 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4163 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4164 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4165 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4166 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4167 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4168 without losing information).
4169
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004170- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004171 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4172 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4173 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4174 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4175 module).
4176
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004177 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004178 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4179 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4180 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4181 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004182
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004183- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004184 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4185 encoding.
4186
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004187- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4188 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4189
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004190- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004191 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4192
4193- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4194 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4195 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4196 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4197
4198- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4199
4200- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4201 ON, and OFF.
4202
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004203- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4204 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4205
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004206Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004207-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004208
4209- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4210 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4211 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004212
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004213- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4214 been added: -X and -E.
4215
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004216Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004217-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004218
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004219- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4220 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4221
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004222C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004223-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004224
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004225- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4226 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4227 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4228 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4229 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4230
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004231- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4232 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4233 as long) arguments.
4234
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004235- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4236 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4237 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4238 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4239 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4240 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4241
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004242- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4243 input.
4244
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004245New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004246-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004247
4248Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004249-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004250
4251Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004252-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004253
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004254- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4255 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4256 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4257
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004258- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4259 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4260 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004261 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004262
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004263 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4264 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4265 import signal
4266 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004267
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004268 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004269 while 1:
4270 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004271 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004272 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4273 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4274 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4275 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004276
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004277
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004278What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4279===========================
4280
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004281*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4282
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004283Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004284--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004285
4286- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4287 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4288 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4289
4290- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4291 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4292 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4293 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4294 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4295 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4296 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004297
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004298- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004299 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004300 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4301 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4302 associate a docstring with a property.
4303
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004304- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4305 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4306 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4307 other built-in object types.
4308
4309- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4310 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4311 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4312 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4313 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4314
4315- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4316 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4317
4318- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4319 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004320 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004321 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4322 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4323 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4324 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4325 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4326
4327- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4328 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4329 class.
4330
4331- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4332 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4333 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4334 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4335
4336- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4337 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4338 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4339 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4340
4341- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4342 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4343
4344- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4345 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4346 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4347 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4348 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004349 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004350 with the same value as s.
4351
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004352- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4353
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004354Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004355----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004356
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004357- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4358
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004359- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4360 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4361 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4362 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4363 objects.
4364
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004365- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4366 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004367 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4368 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4369
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004370- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4371 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4372 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4373
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004374Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004375-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004376
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004377- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4378 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4379 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4380 by the instances.
4381
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004382- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4383 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4384 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4385
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004386- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4387 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4388 before the entire comparison is complete.
4389
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004390- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4391 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4392 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4393
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004394- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4395 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4396 getwriter().
4397
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004398- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4399 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4400
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004401- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004402 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4403 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4404
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004405- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4406 iterable object.
4407
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004408- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4409 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004410
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004411- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4412 authentication.
4413
4414- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4415 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004416
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004417- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004418 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4419 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4420 a sample driver.)
4421
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004422Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004423-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004424
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004425- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4426 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4427 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4428 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4429 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4430 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4431 kernel has large file support.
4432
4433- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4434 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4435 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4436 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4437 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4438
4439- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4440 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4441 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4442
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004443C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004444-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004445
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004446- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4447 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4448
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004449New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004450-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004451
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004452- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4453 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4454
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004455Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004456-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004457
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004458- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4459 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4460 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4461 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4462 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4463
4464- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4465 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4466 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4467 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4468
4469- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4470 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4471
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004472Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004473-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004474
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004475- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004476 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4477 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004478
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004479
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004480What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4481===========================
4482
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004483*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4484
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004485Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004486----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004487
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004488- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4489 big to represent as a C double.
4490
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004491- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4492 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4493 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4494 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4495 restriction).
4496
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004497- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4498 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4499 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4500 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4501 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4502
4503 >>> dir([])
4504 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4505 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4506 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4507 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4508 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4509 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4510 'reverse', 'sort']
4511
4512 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4513
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004514- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004515 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4516 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4517 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4518 OverflowError exception.
4519
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004520- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004521 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004522 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4523 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4524 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4525 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4526 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004527 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004528 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4529 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4530
4531 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4532 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4533 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4534 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004535
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004536- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004537 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4538 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4539 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4540 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4541 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4542 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4543 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4544 once it is created.
4545
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004546- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4547 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4548 (key, value) pairs.
4549
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004550- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004551 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4552 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4553
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004554- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4555 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4556 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4557 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4558 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004559
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004560- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004561 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4562 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4563
4564 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4565
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004566- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004567 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4568
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004569Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004570-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004571
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004572- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004573 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4574 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004575
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004576- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4577 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4578 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4579 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4580 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4581 in this area anymore).
4582
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004583- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4584 threading.Timer.
4585
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004586- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4587 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4588
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004589- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004590 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4591
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004592- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004593 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4594 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4595 converted to Python longs.
4596
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004597- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004598 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4599
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004600- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4601 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4602 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4603
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004604Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004605-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004606
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004607- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4608 division operators as per PEP 238.
4609
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004610Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004611-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004612
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004613- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4614 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4615 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4616 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4617
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004618C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004619-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004620
4621- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004622
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004623- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4624 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004625 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004626
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004627 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4628 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004629 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004630 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004631
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004632- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004633 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4634 module:
4635
4636 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004637
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004638 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4639 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004640
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004641 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4642 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004643
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004644 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4645
4646 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4647
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004648- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004649 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4650 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4651 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004652
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004653New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004654-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004655
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004656- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4657 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4658 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4659 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4660 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004661
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004662Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004663-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004664
4665Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004666-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004667
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004668- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4669 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4670 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4671 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004672 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4673 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4674 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4675 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4676 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004677
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004678- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004679 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4680
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004681
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004682What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4683===========================
4684
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004685*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4686
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004687Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004688-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004689
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004690- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4691 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4692
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004693- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4694 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4695 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004696
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004697- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4698 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4699 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4700 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004701
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004702- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4703
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004704- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004705
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004706Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004707-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004708
4709- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004710 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004711 the module docstring for details.
4712
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004713Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004714-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004715
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004716- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004717 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4718 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4719 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004720
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004721- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4722 Nick Mathewson.
4723
4724Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004725----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004726
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004727- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4728 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4729 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4730 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4731 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4732 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4733 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4734 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4735
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004736- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4737 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4738 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4739 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4740
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004741- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4742 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4743 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4744 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4745 come a long way).
4746
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004747- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4748 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4749 write filters for these warnings).
4750
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004751- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4752 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4753 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4754 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4755 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4756
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004757- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4758 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4759 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4760 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4761 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4762 older distribution.
4763
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004764Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004765-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004766
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004767- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4768 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004769 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004770
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004771- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4772 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4773 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4774
4775- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4776
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004777- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4778
4779- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4780
4781- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4782
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004783- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004784
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004785- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4786
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004787New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004788-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004789
4790C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004791-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004792
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004793- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4794 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4795 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4796 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4797 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4798 against buffer overruns.
4799
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004800- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004801 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4802 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004803 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4804 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4805 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4806
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004807- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4808 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4809 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4810 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4811 deprecated.
4812
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004813Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004814-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004815
4816- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4817 relevant is found.
4818
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004819
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004820What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004821===========================
4822
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004823*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4824
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004825Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004826----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004827
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004828- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4829 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4830 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4831 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4832 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4833 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4834 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4835 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004836 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004837 repaired.
4838
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004839- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004840 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004841 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4842 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4843 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4844 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4845 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4846 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4847 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4848 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4849
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004850- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4851 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4852 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4853 leading BMO character).
4854
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004855- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4856 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4857 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4858
4859 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4860 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4861 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004862
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004863 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4864 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4865 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4866 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4867 for various simple to use conversions.
4868
4869 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4870 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4871
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004872 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4873 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4874 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4875 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4876 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4877 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4878 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4879 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4880 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4881 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4882 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4883 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4884 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4885 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4886 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004887
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004888- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4889 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4890 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004891 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004892 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004893
4894 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004895 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4896 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4897 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4898 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4899 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004900 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4901 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004902
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004903 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4904 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4905 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004906 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004907
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004908- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4909 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4910 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4911 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4912 floating arithmetic,
4913
4914 x = 9007199254740992.0
4915 print long(x)
4916
4917 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4918 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4919 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4920 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4921 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4922 functions are of good quality).
4923
4924 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4925 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4926 algorithms to break.
4927
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004928- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4929 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4930 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4931 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4932 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4933 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4934 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4935 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4936 order.
4937
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004938- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4939 operation along the most common code paths.
4940
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004941- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4942 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4943
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004944- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4945 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4946 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4947 {}.update(UserDict())
4948
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004949- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4950 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4951 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4952 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4953 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4954 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4955 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4956 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4957
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004958- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004959 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004960
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004961 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004962 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4963 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004964 join() method of strings
4965 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004966 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4967 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004968 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004969 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004970
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004971- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4972 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4973
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004974- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4975 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4976
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004977- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4978 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4979 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4980 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4981
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004982- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4983 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004984 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004985 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4986 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004987
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004988- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4989
4990
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004991Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004992-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004993
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004994- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004995 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004996 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4997 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4998
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004999- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5000 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5001
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005002- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5003 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5004 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5005 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5006
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005007- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5008 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5009 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5010
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005011- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5012
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005013- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5014
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005015- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5016 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5017 that are still imported into string.py).
5018
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005019- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5020
5021- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5022 Now it does.
5023
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005024- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5025
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005026- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5027 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5028 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5029 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5030 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005031 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5032 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005033
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005034- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5035 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5036 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5037 'help(object)'.
5038
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005039Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005040-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005041
5042- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005043 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005044 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5045 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5046
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005047- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005048 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5049 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005050
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005051C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005052-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005053
5054- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5055 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005056
5057----
5058
5059**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**