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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10Core and builtins
11-----------------
12
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +000013- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
14 list.sort().
15
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +000016- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
17 (2+3) --> (5).
18
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +000019- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
20
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000021
22Extension Modules
23-----------------
24
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +000025- array.array objects are now picklable.
26
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +000027- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
28 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
29
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +000030- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
31 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
32 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
33
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +000034- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
35 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000036
37Library
38-------
39
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +000040- Enhancements to the csv module:
41
42 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
43 reflecting it's capabilities, and improving it's compliance with
44 PEP 305.
45 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
46 reporting.
47 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
48 dictates.
49 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +000050 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
51 objects, rather than attempting to cast to float, and using the
52 success of that as the determinator.
53 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
54 to floats.
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +000055 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +000056 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
57 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
58 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
59 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
60 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
61 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
62 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
63 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
64 without first creating a dialect class.
65 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
66 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
67 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +000068 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +000069 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
70 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +000071 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
72 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
73 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
74 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +000075 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
76 This has been fixed.
77
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +000078- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
79 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
80 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
81 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
82
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +000083- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
84
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +000085- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
86 (Bug #951915).
87
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +000088- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
89 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
90 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
91 encoding alias table
92
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +000093- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
94
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +000095- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
96 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
97
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +000098- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
99
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000100- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
101
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000102- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
103
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000104- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
105
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000106- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
107
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000108- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
109 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
110 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
111
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000112- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000113 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000114
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000115- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
116 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
117 tokenizer with very long source lines.
118
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000119- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
120 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
121
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000122
123Build
124-----
125
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000126- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
127 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
128 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
129 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
130 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
131 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
132 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
133 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
134
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000135
136C API
137-----
138
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000139- Removed PyRange_New().
140
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000141
142Tests
143-----
144
145
146Mac
147---
148
149
150
151Tools/Demos
152-----------
153
154
155
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000156What's New in Python 2.4 final?
157===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000158
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000159*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000160
161Core and builtins
162-----------------
163
164- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
165 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
166 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
167
168
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000169What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
170==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000171
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000172*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000173
174Core and builtins
175-----------------
176
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000177- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
178 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
179 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
180
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000181
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000182Library
183-------
184
185- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
186 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
187 raised is re-raised.
188
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000189- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
190 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
191
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000192- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
193 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
194 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
195 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
196 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
197 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
198 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
199 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
200 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
201 by the slice are recomputed now.
202
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000203- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000204
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000205Build
206-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000207
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000208- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
209 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
210 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000211
212C API
213-----
214
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000215- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
216
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000217
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000218What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
219================================
220
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000221*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000222
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000223License
224-------
225
226The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
227is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
228changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
229Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
230intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
231durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
232the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
233License::
234
235 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
236
237says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
238to Python 2.1.1.
239
240The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
241License Version 2.
242
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000243Core and builtins
244-----------------
245
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000246- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
247 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
248 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
249 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
250 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
251 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
252 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
253 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
254 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
255 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
256
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000257- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000258
259Extension Modules
260-----------------
261
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000262- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
263 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
264 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
265 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000266
267Library
268-------
269
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000270- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
271 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
272 returned.
273
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000274- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
275
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000276- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
277 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
278
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000279- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
280
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000281- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
282 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000283
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000284- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
285
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000286- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
287
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000288- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000289 the source code is updated and reloaded.
290
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000291Build
292-----
293
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000294- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000295
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000296What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
297================================
298
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000299*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000300
301Core and builtins
302-----------------
303
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000304- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000305 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
306
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000307- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
308 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
309 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
310 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
311
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000312- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
313 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
314
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000315- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
316 constant.
317
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000318- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
319 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
320 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
321 large), and to anomalies such as
322 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
323 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
324 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
325 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000326
327Extension modules
328-----------------
329
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000330- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
331 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000332 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
333 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
334 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000335
336Library
337-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000338
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000339- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000340 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000341 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
342 --swig-cpp.
343
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000344- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
345 it is set.
346
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000347- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000348
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000349- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
350 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
351 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
352 Closes bug #1039270.
353
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000354- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000355
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000356 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000357 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
358 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
359 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
360 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
361 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
362 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
363 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
364 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
365 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
366 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
367 + Updates to documentation.
368
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000369- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
370 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
371 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
372 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
373
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000374- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000375
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000376- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
377 applications should use the getmember function.
378
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000379- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
380
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000381- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
382 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
383 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
384 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
385 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
386 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
387 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
388 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
389 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
390
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000391- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
392 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000393 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000394
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000395- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
396 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
397 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
398 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
399 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
400 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
401 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
402 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000403
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000404- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
405 the new public features (of which there are many).
406
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000407- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000408 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
409 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
410 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
411 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000412 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000413
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000414- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
415
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000416- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
417 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
418 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
419 options.
420
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000421- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
422 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
423 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
424 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
425 conditions under which non-string values work.
426
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000427Build
428-----
429
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000430- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
431 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
432 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
433
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000434- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
435 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
436 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
437 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
438 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000439
440C API
441-----
442
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000443- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
444 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
445
446- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
447
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000448- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
449 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
450 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
451 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
452 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
453 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
454 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
455 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
456 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
457
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000458- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
459
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000460- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
461 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
462 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000463
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000464Tests
465-----
466
467- test__locale ported to unittest
468
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000469Mac
470---
471
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000472- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
473 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
474 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000475
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000476Tools/Demos
477-----------
478
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000479- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
480 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
481 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
482 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
483 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000484
485
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000486What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
487=================================
488
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000489*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000490
491Core and builtins
492-----------------
493
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000494- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000495 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
496
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000497- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
498 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
499 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
500 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
501 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
502 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
503 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
504 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000505 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
506 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
507 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
508 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
509 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000510
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000511- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
512 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
513 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
514 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
515 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
516
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000517- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
518
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000519- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
520 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
521
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000522- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
523 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
524 modified the list.
525
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000526- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
527 functions is now writable.
528
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000529- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
530 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
531 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
532 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
533
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000534- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
535 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
536 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
537 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
538 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000539
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000540- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
541 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
542
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000543Extension modules
544-----------------
545
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000546- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
547
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000548- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
549 data.
550
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000551- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
552 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
553 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
554 supposed to have been truncated away.
555
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000556- Added socket.socketpair().
557
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000558- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
559 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
560
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000561- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000562 versions of Python, have now been removed.
563
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000564Library
565-------
566
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000567- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000568 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000569
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000570- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
571 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
572
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000573- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
574 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
575
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000576- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
577
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000578- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
579 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000580
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000581- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
582 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
583
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000584- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
585
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000586- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
587
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000588- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
589
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000590- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
591 Percivall.
592
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000593- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
594 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
595
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000596- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
597 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
598 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000599 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000600
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000601- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
602 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
603 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
604 and exponent.
605
606- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
607
608- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
609 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
610 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
611
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000612- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
613 to the readline module.
614
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000615- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000616 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
617 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000618
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000619- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
620 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
621 contains symlinks.
622
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000623- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
624 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
625
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000626- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
627 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
628 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
629
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000630- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
631 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
632 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
633 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
634 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
635 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
636 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
637 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
638 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
639 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
640 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
641 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
642 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
643
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000644- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
645
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000646Tools/Demos
647-----------
648
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000649- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
650 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
651
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000652- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
653
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000654Build
655-----
656
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000657- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
658 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
659 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
660 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
661 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
662 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
663 plans to do so.
664
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000665- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
666 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
667
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000668- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
669 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
670
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000671- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
672 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
673
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000674- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
675 GNU/k*BSD systems.
676
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000677- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
678 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
679
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000680C API
681-----
682
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000683..
684
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000685Documentation
686-------------
687
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000688- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
689 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
690
691- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
692 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
693 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000694
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000695New platforms
696-------------
697
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000698- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
699
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000700Tests
701-----
702
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000703..
704
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000705Windows
706-------
707
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000708- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
709 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
710 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
711 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
712 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
713 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
714 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
715 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
716 the problem.
717
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000718Mac
719---
720
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000721..
722
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000723
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000724What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
725=================================
726
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000727*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000728
729Core and builtins
730-----------------
731
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000732- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
733 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
734 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
735 sensitive code.
736
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000737- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000738 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000739
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000740 @staticmethod
741 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000742
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000743 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000744
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000745- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
746 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
747 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
748 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
749 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
750 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
751 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
752 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
753 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
754 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
755 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
756
757 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
758 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
759 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
760 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
761 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
762 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
763 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
764
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000765- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
766 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
767
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000768- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000769 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000770
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000771- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000772 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000773 which was missing for no apparent reason.
774
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000775- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000776 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
777 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
778
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000779- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
780 types that support garbage collection.
781
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000782- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
783
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000784- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
785 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
786 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
787 Jython.
788
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000789- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
790
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000791- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
792 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
793
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000794- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
795 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
796 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000797
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000798- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
799 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
800 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
801
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000802Extension modules
803-----------------
804
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000805- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
806
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000807Library
808-------
809
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000810- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
811 TIS-620
812
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000813- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
814 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
815 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
816 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
817 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
818 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
819 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
820 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
821 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
822 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
823
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000824- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
825
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000826- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
827 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
828 same as when the argument is omitted).
829 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
830
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000831- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
832
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000833- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
834 schemes are offered.
835
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000836- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
837
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000838- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
839 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
840 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
841
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000842- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
843
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000844- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
845 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
846
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000847- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
848 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
849 when dummy_threading is being used.
850
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000851- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
852 from a tarfile.
853
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000854- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000855 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000856
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000857- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
858 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
859 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
860 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
861
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000862- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
863 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
864
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000865- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
866 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
867 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
868 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
869 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
870 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
871 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
872 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
873 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
874 by some other method in progress).
875
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000876- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
877 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
878 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000879
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000880- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
881
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000882- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
883 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
884 AM Kuchling.
885
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000886- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
887 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
888 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
889
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000890- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
891 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
892 instead of unsigned.
893
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000894- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000895 no longer part of the public API.
896
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000897- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
898 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
899 string methods of the same name).
900
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000901- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000902 SF patch 945642.
903
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000904- doctest unittest integration improvements:
905
906 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
907
908 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
909 DocTestSuites.
910
911- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
912 that provide thread-local data.
913
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000914- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
915 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
916
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000917- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
918
919- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
920 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
921 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
922
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000923- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
924
925 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
926 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
927 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000928
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000929 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
930 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
931 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
932 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
933
934 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
935 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
936
937 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
938 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
939 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
940 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
941
942 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
943 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
944 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
945 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
946 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
947
948 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
949 wrapping help output.
950
951 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
952 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
953 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000954
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000955C API
956-----
957
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000958- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
959 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
960 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
961 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
962 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
963 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
964 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
965 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
966 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
967 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
968 its visible semantics have not changed.
969
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000970- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
971 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
972
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000973Documentation
974-------------
975
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000976- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000977
978 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +0000979 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000980
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +0000981 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000982
983 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
984
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000985- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000986
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000987Tests
988-----
989
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000990- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000991 platforms that use the Makefile.
992
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000993- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
994 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
995 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
996
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000997
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000998What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
999=================================
1000
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001001*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001002
1003Core and builtins
1004-----------------
1005
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001006- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1007 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1008 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1009 objects now (one object instead of three).
1010
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001011- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1012 Windows DLLs.
1013
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001014- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1015 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001016
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001017- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1018 a new .pyc magic.
1019
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001020- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1021 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1022 be there.
1023
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001024- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1025 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1026 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1027
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001028- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1029 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1030 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1031
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001032- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1033
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001034- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1035 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1036 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001037
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001038- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1039 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1040
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001041- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1042
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001043- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001044 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001045
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001046- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1047
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001048- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1049
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001050- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1051 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1052
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001053- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1054 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1055 Fixes bug #858016 .
1056
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001057- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1058 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1059 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1060
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001061- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1062 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1063 improves their performance (about 35%).
1064
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001065- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1066 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1067 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1068
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001069- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1070 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1071 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1072 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1073
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001074- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1075 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
1076 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
1077 length is not known).
1078
1079- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1080 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001081 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1082 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001083 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1084
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001085- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1086 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1087
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001088- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1089 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1090 keyword arguments.
1091
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001092- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1093 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1094 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1095
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001096- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1097 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1098 cases.
1099
1100- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1101 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1102 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1103 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1104 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1105 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1106 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1107 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1108 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1109 a release build.
1110
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001111- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1112 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1113
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001114- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001115 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001116
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001117- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1118 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1119 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1120 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1121 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1122 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1123 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1124 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1125 destroyed.
1126
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001127- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1128 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1129 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1130 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1131 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1132 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1133 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1134 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1135
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001136- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1137 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1138 character other than a space.
1139
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001140- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1141 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1142 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1143 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1144 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1145 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1146 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1147 attributes with the same name.
1148
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001149- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1150 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1151 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1152 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1153 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1154 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1155 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1156 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1157 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1158 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1159 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1160 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1161 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1162 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001163
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001164- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1165 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1166 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1167 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1168 This has been repaired.
1169
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001170- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1171
1172- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1173
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001174- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1175 over a sequence.
1176
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001177- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001178 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001179
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001180- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1181
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001182- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1183 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1184 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1185 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1186 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1187 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1188 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1189 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1190
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001191- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1192 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1193 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1194
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001195- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1196 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1197 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1198 freelist.
1199
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001200- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1201 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1202
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001203- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1204 number.
1205
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001206- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1207 a TypeError exception.
1208
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001209- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1210 820195.
1211
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001212- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1213 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1214 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1215
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001216- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001217 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1218 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001219
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001220- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1221 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1222 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1223
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001224- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1225 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001226 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001227
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001228- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001229 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1230 the first call.
1231
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001232
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001233Extension modules
1234-----------------
1235
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001236- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1237 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1238
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001239- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1240 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1241 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1242 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1243 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1244 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1245 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001246
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001247- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1248
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001249- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1250
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001251- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1252 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1253
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001254- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1255 fewer false positives.
1256
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001257- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1258 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1259
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001260- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001261 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1262
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001263- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001264 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001265 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001266 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1267 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001268
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001269- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1270 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1271 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1272 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1273
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001274- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1275 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1276 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1277 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1278 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1279 #897625.
1280
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001281- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1282 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1283
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001284- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1285 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1286 and pops on either side of the deque.
1287
1288- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1289 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1290
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001291- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1292 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1293 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1294 other functions that expect a function argument.
1295
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001296- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1297
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001298- os.getsid was added.
1299
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001300- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1301 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1302 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1303
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001304- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1305
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001306- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1307
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001308- readline.clear_history was added.
1309
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001310- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1311
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001312- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1313
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001314- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1315
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001316- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1317
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001318- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1319
1320- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1321
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001322- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1323
1324- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1325
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001326- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1327 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1328 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1329
1330- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1331 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1332 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1333 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1334 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1335 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1336 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1337
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001338- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1339 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1340 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1341 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001342
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001343- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001344 iterators from a single iterable.
1345
1346- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1347 of raising a TypeError exception.
1348
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001349- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1350 as parameter.
1351
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001352Library
1353-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001354
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001355- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1356 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1357 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001358
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001359- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1360 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1361 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001362
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001363- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001364
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001365- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1366 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001367
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001368- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1369 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1370
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001371- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1372
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001373- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001374 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001375
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001376- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001377 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001378
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001379- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1380
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001381- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1382 on cygwin and mingw32.
1383
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001384- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1385
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001386- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1387 module.
1388
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001389- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1390 installation scheme for all platforms.
1391
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001392- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001393 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001394
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001395- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1396 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1397 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1398
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001399- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1400 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1401 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1402
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001403- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1404
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001405- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1406
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001407- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1408 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1409
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001410- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1411 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1412 type pattern with the same value exists.
1413
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001414- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1415 when run from the command prompt).
1416
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001417- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1418 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1419
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001420- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1421 default sort).
1422
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001423- Added global runctx function to profile module
1424
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001425- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1426
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001427- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1428
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001429- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1430
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001431- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001432 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1433 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1434 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1435 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1436 accordingly.
1437
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001438- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1439 decoding standards.
1440
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001441- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1442 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1443 called for all requests.
1444
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001445- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1446 they are passed to the compiler.
1447
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001448- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1449 indent, width and depth.
1450
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001451- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1452 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1453
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001454- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1455 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1456
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001457- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1458
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001459- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1460
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001461- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1462
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001463- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1464 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1465
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001466- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001467 for better performance.
1468
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001469- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001470
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001471- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1472 a string).
1473
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001474- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1475
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001476- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1477
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001478- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1479
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001480- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1481
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001482- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1483 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1484 list of fieldnames.
1485
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001486- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1487 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1488
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001489- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1490
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001491- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1492 empty lists.
1493
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001494- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1495 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1496 and shelves.
1497
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001498- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1499 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1500
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001501- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001502 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1503 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001504
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001505- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1506 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001507 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001508
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001509- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001510 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1511 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1512
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001513- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1514 and removed in Py2.4.
1515
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001516- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1517
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001518- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1519
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001520Tools/Demos
1521-----------
1522
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001523- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1524 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1525
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001526- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1527
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001528- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1529 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1530 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1531 destination in situations where both files are given.
1532
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001533- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1534 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1535 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1536 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1537
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001538- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1539
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001540- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1541 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1542 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1543 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1544 now.
1545
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001546- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1547 in effect
1548
1549- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1550 C-c C-h
1551
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001552- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1553 -d option was given.
1554
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001555Build
1556-----
1557
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001558- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1559 build under OS X.
1560
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001561- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1562 --enable-profiling.
1563
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001564- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1565 is configured --with-tsc.
1566
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001567- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1568 on AMD64.
1569
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001570- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1571 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1572
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001573- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1574 removed.
1575
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001576- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1577 supported (see PEP 11).
1578
1579- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1580
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001581- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1582
1583- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1584 (see PEP 11).
1585
1586- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1587 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1588
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001589C API
1590-----
1591
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001592- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1593 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1594 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1595
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001596- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1597 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1598 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1599 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1600
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001601- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1602 generator objects.
1603
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001604- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1605 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001606 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1607 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001608
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001609- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1610 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1611
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001612- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1613 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1614 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1615 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1616 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1617
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001618- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1619 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1620 about 10% faster.
1621
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001622- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1623 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1624
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001625- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1626 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1627 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1628 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1629
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001630Windows
1631-------
1632
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001633- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1634 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1635 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1636 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1637
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001638- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1639 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1640 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1641
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001642
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001643What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1644===============================
1645
1646*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1647
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001648IDLE
1649----
1650
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001651- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1652 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1653 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1654 context-menu actions.
1655
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001656- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1657 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1658 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1659 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1660 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1661 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1662 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1663 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1664 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1665
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001666
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001667What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1668=============================================
1669
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001670*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001671
1672Core and builtins
1673-----------------
1674
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001675- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001676 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001677 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1678
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001679Extension modules
1680-----------------
1681
1682- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1683 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1684 than once. This has been fixed.
1685
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001686- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1687 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1688 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1689 call.
1690
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001691- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1692
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001693Library
1694-------
1695
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001696- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1697 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1698
1699- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1700 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1701 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1702 restored.
1703
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001704IDLE
1705----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001706
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001707- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001708
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001709Build
1710-----
1711
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001712- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1713 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1714
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001715C API
1716-----
1717
1718Windows
1719-------
1720
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001721- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1722 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1723
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001724- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1725
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001726Mac
1727---
1728
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001729- Various fixes to pimp.
1730
1731- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1732
1733- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1734 more problems than it solves.
1735
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001736
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001737What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1738=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001739
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001740*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1741
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001742Core and builtins
1743-----------------
1744
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001745- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1746 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1747
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001748- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1749 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001750 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001751
1752- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1753 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1754 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001755 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001756
1757- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1758 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001759
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001760- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1761 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1762 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1763
1764- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001765 770247.
1766
1767- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001768
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001769Extension modules
1770-----------------
1771
1772- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1773 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1774
1775- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1776
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001777- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1778
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001779- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1780 contained within the _strptime module.
1781
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001782- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1783 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1784
1785- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001786 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1787
1788- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1789 the find_class attribute, if present.
1790
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001791- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001792
1793 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1794 (SF bug 763298).
1795
1796 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001797 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1798 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1799 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001800
1801 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1802
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001803Library
1804-------
1805
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001806- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1807
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001808- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1809 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1810 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1811 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1812 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1813 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1814 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1815 or Tester().
1816
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001817- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1818 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1819 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1820 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1821 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1822 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1823 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1824 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1825 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001826
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001827 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001828
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001829- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1830 weren't before was an oversight.
1831
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001832- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1833 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1834
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001835- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1836 when there are no lines.
1837
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001838- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1839 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1840
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001841- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1842 to child processes.
1843
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001844- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1845
1846- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1847
1848- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1849 xmlrpclib.
1850
1851- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1852 responses.
1853
1854- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1855 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1856
1857- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1858 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1859 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1860
1861- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1862 used as patterns.
1863
1864- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1865 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1866 than Tk 8.3.
1867
1868- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1869
1870- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001871
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001872Tools/Demos
1873-----------
1874
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001875- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1876
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001877- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1878
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001879- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001880
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001881Build
1882-----
1883
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001884- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1885
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001886- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1887
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001888- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1889 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001890
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001891- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1892 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1893 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001894
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001895C API
1896-----
1897
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001898- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1899 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1900
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001901Windows
1902-------
1903
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001904- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1905 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1906 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1907 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1908 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1909 Python exception ::
1910
1911 thread.error: can't start new thread
1912
1913 is raised now.
1914
1915- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1916 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1917 instead of from DLL teardown.
1918
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001919Mac
1920---
1921
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001922- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001923 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001924 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1925 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1926 the executable in the bundle.
1927
1928- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001929
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001930- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1931
1932- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1933 on Panther.
1934
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001935What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1936================================
1937
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001938*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001939
1940Core and builtins
1941-----------------
1942
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001943- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1944 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1945 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1946 with the -i option.
1947
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001948- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1949 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1950
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001951- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1952 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1953
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001954- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1955 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1956 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1957 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1958 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1959 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1960 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1961 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1962 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1963 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1964 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1965 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1966 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001967
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001968- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1969 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1970 embedded in a lambda expression.
1971
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001972- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1973 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1974 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1975 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1976 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1977
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001978- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1979 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1980 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1981
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001982- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1983 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1984
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001985- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1986 It's writable again.
1987
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001988- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1989 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1990 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001991 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001992
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001993- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1994 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1995 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1996
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001997Extension modules
1998-----------------
1999
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002000- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2001 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2002
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002003- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2004 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2005 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2006 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2007
2008- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2009 collection.
2010
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002011- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2012 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2013 unique within a single program run.
2014
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002015- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2016 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2017
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002018- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2019 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2020
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002021- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2022 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002023
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002024- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2025
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002026- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2027 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2028
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002029- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2030 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2031 for many BSD-derived systems.
2032
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002033
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002034Library
2035-------
2036
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002037- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2038 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2039 primary ones:
2040
2041 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2042 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2043 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2044
2045 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2046 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2047 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2048 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2049 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2050 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2051
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002052- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2053 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2054 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2055 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2056 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2057 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2058 argument.
2059
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002060- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2061 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2062 in the archive.
2063
2064- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2065 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2066
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002067- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2068 569574).
2069
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002070- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2071 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2072 no more.
2073
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002074- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2075 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2076 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2077 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2078 code coverage.
2079
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002080- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2081 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2082 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002083 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2084 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002085
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002086- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2087 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2088 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002089 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002090
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002091- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2092
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002093- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2094 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2095 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2096 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2097
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002098- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2099 handling.
2100
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002101- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2102 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2103
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002104- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2105 in socket.py.
2106
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002107- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2108
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002109- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2110 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2111 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2112 opener with proxy support.
2113
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002114- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2115
2116- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2117
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002118Tools/Demos
2119-----------
2120
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002121- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2122
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002123- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2124
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002125- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2126 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002127
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002128- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2129 files.
2130
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002131Build
2132-----
2133
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002134- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002135 different root directory.
2136
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002137C API
2138-----
2139
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002140- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2141 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2142 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2143 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2144 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2145 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2146 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2147 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2148 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2149 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2150
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002151- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2152 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2153 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2154 from Python.
2155
2156
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002157New platforms
2158-------------
2159
2160None this time.
2161
2162Tests
2163-----
2164
2165- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2166 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2167
2168Windows
2169-------
2170
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002171- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2172
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002173- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2174 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2175 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2176 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2177 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2178 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2179 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2180 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2181 that's what it's for.
2182
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002183Mac
2184---
2185
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002186- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2187 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2188 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2189 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002190- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2191 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2192- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002193
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002194SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2195------------------------------------
2196
2197430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2198598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2199622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2200661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2201683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2202697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2203713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2204724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2205727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2206729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2207730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2208731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2209732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2210733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2211735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2212740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2213744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2214745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2215747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2216749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2217751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2218753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2219755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2220757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2221760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2222
2223
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002224What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2225================================
2226
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002227*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002228
2229Core and builtins
2230-----------------
2231
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002232- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2233 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2234
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002235- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2236 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2237 and cannot be strings).
2238
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002239- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2240 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2241 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2242 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2243
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002244- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2245 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2246 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2247 Python itself.
2248
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002249- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2250 the referenced object, if it has one.
2251
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002252- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2253 the thread started at
2254 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2255
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002256- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2257 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2258 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2259 placed on a list index.
2260
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002261- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2262 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2263 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2264 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2265
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002266- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2267 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2268 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2269 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2270 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2271 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2272 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2273
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002274- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2275 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2276 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2277 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2278 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2279
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002280- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2281 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002282
2283- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2284 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2285 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2286 #693195.)
2287
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002288- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2289 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002290
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002291- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002292 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002293 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2294 interpreter executions, would fail.
2295
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002296- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002297 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002298 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002299
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002300Extension modules
2301-----------------
2302
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002303- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2304 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2305 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2306 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2307
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002308- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2309 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2310
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002311- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2312 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2313 and Greg Chapman.)
2314
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002315- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2316 recursively.
2317
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002318- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002319 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2320 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2321 leaks.
2322
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002323- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2324
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002325- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2326 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2327 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2328 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2329 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2330 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2331 #705836.
2332
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002333- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002334 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2335
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002336- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2337 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2338 See SF bug #692416.
2339
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002340- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2341 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2342
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002343- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2344 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2345 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002346
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002347- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002348 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2349 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2350
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002351- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2352 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2353 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2354 timeouts to work properly.
2355
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002356Library
2357-------
2358
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002359- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2360 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2361 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2362 future release.
2363
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002364- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2365 for querying platform dependent features.
2366
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002367- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002368
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002369- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2370 pickle protocol versions.
2371
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002372- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2373 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2374 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2375
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002376- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2377
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002378- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2379 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2380 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2381 modules.
2382
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002383- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2384 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2385 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2386
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002387- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2388 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2389
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002390- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2391 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2392 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2393
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002394- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002395 MS Office extensions.
2396
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002397- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2398 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2399
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002400- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2401 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2402
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002403- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2404 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2405 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2406 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2407 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2408 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2409
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002410- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2411 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2412 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002413
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002414- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2415 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2416 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2417
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002418- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2419
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002420- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2421 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2422 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2423
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002424Tools/Demos
2425-----------
2426
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002427- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2428 See the module docstring for details.
2429
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002430Build
2431-----
2432
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002433- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2434 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002435
2436C API
2437-----
2438
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002439- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2440
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002441- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2442 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2443 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2444
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002445- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2446 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002447
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002448 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2449 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2450 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002451
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002452- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002453 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2454
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002455- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2456 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2457 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002458
2459New platforms
2460-------------
2461
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002462None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002463
2464Tests
2465-----
2466
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002467- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2468 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002469
2470Windows
2471-------
2472
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002473- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2474 function.
2475
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002476- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2477 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002478
2479Mac
2480---
2481
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002482- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2483 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002484
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002485- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2486 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002487
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002488- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2489 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2490 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002491
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002492- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002493 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2494 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002495
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002496- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2497 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002498
2499
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002500What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2501=================================
2502
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002503*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002504
2505Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002506-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002507
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002508- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2509 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2510 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2511
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002512- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2513 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2514 (SF patch #664376.)
2515
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002516- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2517 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2518 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2519 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2520 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2521 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002522 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002523
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002524- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2525 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2526 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2527 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002528 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002529
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002530- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2531 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2532 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2533 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2534 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2535 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2536 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2537 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2538 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2539 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2540 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2541
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002542- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2543 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2544 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2545 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2546 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2547 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2548
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002549- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2550 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2551
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002552- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2553 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2554 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2555 case.)
2556
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002557- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2558 passed as unicode strings.
2559
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002560- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2561 See SF bug #683467.
2562
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002563- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2564 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2565
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002566- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2567
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002568- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2569
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002570- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2571 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2572 arguments.
2573
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002574- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2575 See SF bug #667147.
2576
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002577- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002578 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002579 See SF bug #676155.
2580
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002581- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002582 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002583 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2584 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2585 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2586 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2587 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2588 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002589
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002590Extension modules
2591-----------------
2592
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002593- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2594 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2595 tp_as_number pointer.
2596
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002597- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2598 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2599 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2600 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2601 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2602
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002603- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2604
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002605- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2606
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002607- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002608 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002609 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2610 patch #678531.)
2611
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002612- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2613 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2614
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002615- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2616 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2617
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002618- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2619
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002620- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2621 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2622 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2623
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002624- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2625
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002626- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2627 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2628
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002629- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002630
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002631- datetime changes:
2632
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002633 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2634
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002635 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2636 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2637 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2638 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2639 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2640 now.
2641
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002642 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002643 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2644 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002645
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002646 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002647 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002648 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2649 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2650 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2651 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002652
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002653 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2654 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2655 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002656 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2657
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002658 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2659 by a later example coded by Guido.
2660
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002661 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002662 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2663 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2664 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002665 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2666 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2667
2668 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2669 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2670 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2671 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2672 tzinfo subclass instance.
2673
2674 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2675 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2676 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2677 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2678 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2679 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2680 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2681 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002682
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002683 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2684 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2685 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2686 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2687 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002688 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2689
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002690 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002691
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002692 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2693 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2694 as a naive datetime object.
2695
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002696 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2697 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2698 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2699
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002700 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2701 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2702 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2703 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2704 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2705 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2706 comparison.
2707
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002708 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2709 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2710 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2711 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002712 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002713
2714 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002715
2716 and ::
2717
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002718 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2719
2720 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2721 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2722 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2723 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2724
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002725 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2726 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2727 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2728 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2729 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2730
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002731 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2732 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002733 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2734 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002735
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002736Library
2737-------
2738
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002739- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2740 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2741
2742- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2743 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2744 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2745 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2746 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2747 See PEP 307 for details.
2748
2749- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2750 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2751
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002752- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2753 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002754 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002755 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2756 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002757 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002758
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002759- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2760 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2761
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002762- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2763 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2764 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2765
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002766- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2767
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002768- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2769 exception.
2770
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002771- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2772 class.
2773
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002774- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2775 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2776 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2777
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002778- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2779 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2780
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002781- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002782 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2783 See SF bug #659228.
2784
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002785- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2786 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2787 See SF patch #651082.
2788
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002789- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002790
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002791- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2792 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2793
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002794- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002795 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002796
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002797- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2798 DOS paths from other platforms.
2799
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002800Tools/Demos
2801-----------
2802
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002803- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2804 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2805 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2806 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2807 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2808 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2809 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2810 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2811 example:
2812
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002813 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2814 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002815
2816 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2817
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002818
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002819Build
2820-----
2821
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002822- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2823 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2824 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002825 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2826
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002827 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2828
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002829- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2830 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2831 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2832 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2833 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2834 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2835 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2836 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2837 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2838
2839- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2840 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2841 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2842 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2843
2844- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2845 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2846
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002847C API
2848-----
2849
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002850- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2851 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002852
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002853- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2854 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2855 tp_as_number pointer.
2856
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002857- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2858 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2859 (SF #681367)
2860
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002861- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2862 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2863 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2864 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002865
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002866Tests
2867-----
2868
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002869- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002870 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2871 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2872 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2873 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2874 pydoc.)
2875
2876- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2877
2878- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002879
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002880Windows
2881-------
2882
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002883- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2884 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2885 time).
2886
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002887- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2888 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2889
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002890- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2891 release without strong cryptography.
2892
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002893- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002894 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002895
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002896- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2897 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2898
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002899Mac
2900---
2901
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002902- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2903 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002904
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002905- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2906 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2907 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002908
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002909- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2910 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002911
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002912- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2913 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2914 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2915 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002916
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002917- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002918 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2919 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2920 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002921
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002922
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002923What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002924=================================
2925
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002926*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002927
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002928Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002929--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002930
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002931- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2932
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002933- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2934 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002935 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002936 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002937 a different meaning than before.
2938
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002939- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002940 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002941 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002942
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002943- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002944 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002945 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002946
2947- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2948 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2949 and deallocation.
2950
2951- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2952 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2953
2954- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2955 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2956 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2957 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2958 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2959
2960- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2961 now detected by the garbage collector.
2962
2963- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2964 [SF bug 519621]
2965
2966- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2967 identifier.
2968
2969- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2970 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2971 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2972 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2973 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2974 [SF bug 563060]
2975
2976- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2977 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2978 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2979 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2980 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2981
2982- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2983 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2984 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2985
2986- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2987
2988- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2989 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2990 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2991 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2992 state of the slots would be lost.)
2993
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002994Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002995-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002996
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002997- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002998 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2999 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3000 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3001 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003002 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3003 Jython 2.1.
3004
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003005- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003006 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003007 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3008 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3009 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3010 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3011 these, see PEP 302.
3012
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003013- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3014 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3015 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3016
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003017- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3018 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3019 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3020
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003021- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3022 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3023 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3024
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003025- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3026 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3027 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3028 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3029 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3030 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3031 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3032 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3033 releases or implementations.
3034
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003035- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003036 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3037 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003038
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003039- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3040 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3041
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003042- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3043 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3044 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3045
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003046- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3047 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3048
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003049- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3050 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003051 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3052 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003053
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003054- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3055 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3056 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3057 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3058 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3059
3060 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3061 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3062 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3063 pattern.
3064
3065 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3066 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3067 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3068 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3069
3070 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3071 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3072 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3073 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3074 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3075 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3076
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003077- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3078 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3079 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3080 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3081 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3082 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3083 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3084 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003085
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003086- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3087 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3088 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3089 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3090 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003091 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3092 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3093 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3094 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3095 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3096 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3097 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003098
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003099- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3100 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3101
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003102- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3103 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3104 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3105 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3106 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3107 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3108 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3109 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3110 to Zack Weinberg!
3111
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003112- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3113 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3114 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3115 type. This has been fixed now.
3116
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003117- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3118 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3119 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3120
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003121- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3122 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3123 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3124 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3125 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3126 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3127 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3128 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003129 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003130
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003131- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3132 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3133 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003134
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003135- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3136 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3137 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3138 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3139 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3140 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3141 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3142 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003143 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003144 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3145 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3146
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003147- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3148 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3149 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3150 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3151 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3152 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3153 this.)
3154
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003155- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3156 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003157 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003158 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003159 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3160 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003161 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3162 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003163
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003164- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3165 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3166 currently running.
3167
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003168- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3169 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3170 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3171 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3172
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003173- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3174 as directory names.
3175
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003176- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3177 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3178
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003179- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3180 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3181
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003182- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003183 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3184 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003185
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003186- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3187 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3188 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3189 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3190 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3191
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003192- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3193 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3194 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3195 removed.
3196
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003197- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3198 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3199 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3200
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003201- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3202 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3203 to __debug__.
3204
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003205- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3206 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3207 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3208
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003209- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3210 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3211 deprecated now.
3212
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003213- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3214 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3215 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003216
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003217- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3218 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3219 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3220 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3221 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003222
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003223- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3224 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3225
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003226- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3227 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3228 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003229 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003230 is backward compatible.
3231
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003232- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3233 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3234 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3235 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3236 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3237
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003238- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3239 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3240 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3241 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3242 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3243 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003244
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003245- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3246 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3247
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003248- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3249 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3250
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003251- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3252 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3253 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3254 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3255 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3256
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003257- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3258 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3259 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3260
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003261- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003262 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3263
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003264- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3265 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3266 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003267
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003268- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3269 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3270
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003271- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3272 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3273 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3274
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003275- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3276
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003277Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003278-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003279
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003280- Added three operators to the operator module:
3281 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3282 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3283 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3284
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003285- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3286
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003287- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3288 archives.
3289
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003290- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3291 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3292 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3293
3294 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3295
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003296- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3297 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3298 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003299 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003300
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003301- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3302 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3303 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3304 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003305 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3306 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3307 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3308 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003309
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003310- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3311 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003312
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003313- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3314
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003315- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3316 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3317
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003318- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3319 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3320 supported.
3321
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003322- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3323
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003324- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3325 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003326
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003327- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3328 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3329
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003330- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3331
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003332- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3333 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3334
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003335- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3336 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3337 functions but callable type objects.
3338
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003339- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003340 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003341 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003342
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003343- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3344 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003345
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003346- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3347 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003348
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003349- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3350 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3351 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3352 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3353
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003354- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3355 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003356
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003357- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3358 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3359 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3360 and __imul__.
3361
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003362- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003363 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3364 is called.
3365
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003366- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3367 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3368 interpreter was compiled.
3369
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003370- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3371 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3372 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003373 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003374 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3375 1, not 2.
3376
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003377- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3378 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3379 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3380 limit.
3381
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003382- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3383 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3384 bug #623464.
3385
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003386- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3387 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3388 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3389 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3390
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003391Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003392-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003393
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003394- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3395
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003396- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3397 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3398 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3399 with Python 2.3a2.
3400
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003401- os.path exposes getctime.
3402
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003403- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003404 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003405 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003406 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003407 unit tests of floating point results.
3408
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003409- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3410 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3411 has been increased.
3412
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003413- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3414 executed.
3415
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003416- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3417 postinstallation script.
3418
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003419- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3420 test the current module.
3421
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003422- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003423 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3424 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3425 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3426 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3427
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003428- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003429 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003430 Ward's Optik package.
3431
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003432- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3433 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3434 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3435 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3436
3437- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3438 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003439 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003440
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003441- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3442 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3443 shelf are binary pickles.
3444
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003445- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3446 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3447
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003448- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3449 modules are iterators now.
3450
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003451- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3452 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3453 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3454 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3455 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3456 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003457
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003458- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3459 with their entity value.
3460
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003461- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3462
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003463- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3464 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003465
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003466- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3467 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003468 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003469
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003470- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3471 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3472 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3473 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3474 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3475 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3476 main():
3477
3478 import locale
3479 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3480
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003481- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3482 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3483
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003484- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3485 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3486 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3487 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3488 to the new standard.
3489
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003490- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3491 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3492 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3493 an extension to the database.
3494
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003495- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3496 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3497 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3498 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003499 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003500
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003501- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003502 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003503
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003504- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3505 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3506 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3507 bounded integers.
3508
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003509- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3510 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3511 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3512 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3513 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3514 in existence.
3515
3516 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3517 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3518 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3519 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3520 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3521 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3522
3523 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3524 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3525 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3526 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3527
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003528- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3529 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3530 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3531
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003532- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3533
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003534- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3535 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3536 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3537 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3538
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003539- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3540 argument.
3541
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003542- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3543 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3544 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3545 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3546 [SF patch 560794].
3547
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003548- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3549 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3550 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003551 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3552 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3553 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003554
3555- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3556 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003557
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003558- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3559 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3560 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3561 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003562
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003563- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3564 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3565 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3566 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3567 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3568
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003569- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003570
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003571- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3572
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003573- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3574 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3575 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3576 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3577 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3578 identical to None.
3579
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003580- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3581 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3582 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3583 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3584 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3585 results now.
3586
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003587- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3588 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3589
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003590- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3591 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3592 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3593 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3594 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3595 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3596 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3597 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3598
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003599- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3600
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003601- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3602 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3603
3604- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3605 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3606 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3607 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3608 and other systems.
3609
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003610- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3611 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3612 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3613 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 +00003614 work well with these.
3615
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003616- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3617
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003618- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003619 connections.
3620
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003621- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3622 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3623 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3624
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003625- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3626 sets
3627
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003628- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3629 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3630 name.
3631
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003632- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3633 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3634 passed in.
3635
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003636- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003637 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003638 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3639 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003640
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003641- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3642
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003643- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3644
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003645- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3646 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3647 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3648
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003649- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3650 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3651 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3652 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003653 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003654
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003655- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003656 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003657 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003658
3659- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3660 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3661 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3662
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003663- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003664 the value of its expression argument.
3665
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003666- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3667 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3668 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3669
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003670- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3671 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3672 skipstone browser was included.
3673
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003674- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3675 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3676
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003677Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003678-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003679
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003680- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3681 names in addition to accepting file names.
3682
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003683- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3684 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3685 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3686 still used and useful.)
3687
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003688- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3689 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3690 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3691 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003692
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003693- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3694 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3695 the generated binary.
3696
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003697Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003698-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003699
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003700- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3701
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003702- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3703 except in the hands of experts.
3704
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003705- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003706 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3707 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3708 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003709
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003710- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3711 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3712 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3713 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3714 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3715 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3716 builds.
3717
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003718- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3719 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3720 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3721 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3722 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3723 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3724 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3725 new type.
3726
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003727- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003728
3729 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3730 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3731 positive infinities.
3732
3733 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3734 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3735 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3736 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3737 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3738 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3739 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3740
3741 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3742
3743 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3744
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003745- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3746 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3747 size of the executable.
3748
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003749- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3750 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3751 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3752 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003753
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003754- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3755
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003756- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3757 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3758 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003759
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003760- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3761 well as Unix.
3762
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003763- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3764 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3765 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3766 modules in the README file for details.
3767
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003768C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003769-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003770
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003771- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3772 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003773 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003774 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003775 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003776
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003777- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3778 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3779 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3780 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3781 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3782 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003783 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003784 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3785 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3786 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3787 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3788 aligned.)
3789
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003790- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3791 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3792 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3793
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003794- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3795 level.
3796
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003797- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3798 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3799 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3800 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3801 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3802
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003803- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3804 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3805 code.
3806
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003807- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3808 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3809 adjusting for negative indices.
3810
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003811- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3812 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3813 object.
3814
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003815- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3816 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3817 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3818
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003819- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3820 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003821
3822- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3823
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003824- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3825 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3826 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3827 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3828
3829- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3830
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003831- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003832
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003833- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003834 without going through the buffer API.
3835
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003836- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003837
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003838- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3839 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3840 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3841 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3842
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003843- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3844 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3845
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003846- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003847 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3848
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003849New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003850-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003851
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003852- OpenVMS is now supported.
3853
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003854- AtheOS is now supported.
3855
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003856- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3857
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003858- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3859
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003860Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003861-----
3862
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003863- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3864 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3865 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003866
3867Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003868-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003869
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003870- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3871 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3872 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3873 bugs.
3874 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003875 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003876 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3877 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003878 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003879
3880- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003881 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003882
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003883- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3884 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3885
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003886- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3887 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003888 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003889 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3890
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003891- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3892 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3893 use files" uninstall option).
3894
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003895- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3896
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003897- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3898 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3899
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003900- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3901 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3902 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3903
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003904- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3905 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3906 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3907 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3908 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003909 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3910 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3911 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003912
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003913- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003914 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003915 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3916 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3917 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3918 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3919 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3920 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3921 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3922 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3923 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3924 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3925 work around.
3926
3927- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3928 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3929 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3930 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3931 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3932 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3933 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3934 specified with O_CREAT too).
3935
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003936Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003937----
3938
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003939- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003940
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003941- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3942 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3943 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3944
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003945- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3946 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3947 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3948
3949- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3950 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3951 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3952 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3953 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3954 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3955 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3956 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003957
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003958- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3959 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3960 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003961
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003962- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3963 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3964 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3965 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3966 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003967
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003968- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3969 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3970 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003971
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003972- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3973 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003974
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003975- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3976 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3977 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3978 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3979 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003980
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003981- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3982 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3983 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3984
3985- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3986 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3987 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003988
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003989- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3990 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3991 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3992 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003993 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003994
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003995- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3996 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003997
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003998- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3999 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004000
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004001- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004002 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004003 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4004 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004005
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004006
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004007What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004008===============================
4009
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004010*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4011
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004012Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004013--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004014
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004015- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4016 with a custom metaclass.
4017
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004018Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004019-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004020
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004021- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4022 are proxies.
4023
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004024Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004025-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004026
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004027- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4028 very short strings.
4029
4030- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4031 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4032 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4033 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4034 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4035
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004036Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004037-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004038
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004039- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4040 close or delete time).
4041
4042- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4043 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4044
4045- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4046
4047- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004048 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004049
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004050Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004051-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004052
4053Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004054-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004055
4056C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004057-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004058
4059New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004060-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004061
4062Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004063-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004064
4065Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004066-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004067
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004068- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4069
4070- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4071 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4072
4073- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4074 deleted at process exit time.
4075
4076- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4077 in backslash.
4078
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004079Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004080----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004081
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004082- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4083 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4084 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4085
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004086
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004087What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004088===========================
4089
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004090*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4091
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004092Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004093--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004094
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004095- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4096 been extensively updated. See
4097
4098 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4099
4100 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4101
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004102- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4103 deleted!
4104
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004105- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4106 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4107 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4108 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4109 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4110
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004111- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4112
4113 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4114 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4115
4116 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4117 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4118 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4119 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4120 supported anyway.
4121
4122 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4123 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4124
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004125- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4126 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4127 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4128 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4129 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004130
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004131- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4132 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4133 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4134
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004135Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004136-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004137
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004138- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4139 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4140 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4141 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4142 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4143 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004144 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4145 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4146 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4147 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004148
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004149- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4150 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4151 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4152
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004153Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004154-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004155
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004156- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4157
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004158Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004159-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004160
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004161- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4162 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4163 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4164 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4165 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4166 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4167
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004168- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4169
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004170- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4171
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004172- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4173
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004174- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4175 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4176 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4177
4178- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4179
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004180Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004181-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004182
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004183- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4184 off a search on Google.
4185
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004186Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004187-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004188
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004189- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4190 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4191 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4192 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4193 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4194 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4195 other platforms should do likewise.
4196
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004197- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4198 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4199 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4200
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004201C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004202-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004203
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004204- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4205 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4206 producing key-value pairs.
4207
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004208- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004209 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004210 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4211 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4212 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4213 previously went unchallenged.
4214
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004215New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004216-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004217
4218Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004219-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004220
4221Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004222-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004223
4224Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004225----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004226
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004227- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4228 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004229
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004230- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4231 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4232 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4233 home.
4234
4235
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004236What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004237===========================
4238
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004239*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4240
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004241Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004242--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004243
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004244- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4245 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004246
4247 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004248 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004249
4250 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4251 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004252 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004253 This needs to be documented.
4254
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004255- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4256 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4257
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004258- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4259 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4260 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4261
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004262- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4263 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4264
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004265- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4266 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4267 class forbids it).
4268
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004269- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4270 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4271 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4272
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004273- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4274
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004275Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004276-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004277
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004278- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4279 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004280 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004281
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004282- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4283 (like 1 + '').
4284
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004285Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004286-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004287
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004288- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4289 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4290 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4291 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004292 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004293 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4294
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004295- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4296 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4297 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4298 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4299
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004300- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4301 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004302 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4303 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4304 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004305
4306- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4307 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004308
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004309- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4310 bytes on its input.
4311
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004312Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004313-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004314
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004315- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004316 convenience function.
4317
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004318- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4319 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4320 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004321 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4322 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4323 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4324 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4325 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4326 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004327
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004328- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4329 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4330 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4331 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4332
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004333- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4334 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4335 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4336
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004337- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4338 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4339 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4340 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4341
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004342- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4343 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004344 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004345 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4346 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4347 new -l and -e options.
4348
4349- statcache is now deprecated.
4350
4351- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4352 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004353 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004354 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4355 time properly taken into account.
4356
4357- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4358 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4359 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4360 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4361
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004362Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004363-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004364
4365Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004366-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004367
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004368- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4369 is built with libdb3 if available.
4370
4371- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4372
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004373C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004374-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004375
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004376- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4377 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4378 PySequence_Size().
4379
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004380- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4381
4382- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4383 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4384 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4385
4386- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4387 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4388
4389- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4390 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4391
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004392New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004393-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004394
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004395- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4396 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4397
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004398- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4399 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4400
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004401- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4402
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004403Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004404-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004405
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004406- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4407 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4408
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004409Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004410-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004411
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004412Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004413----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004414
4415- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4416 removed completely in the next release.
4417
4418- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4419 OSX.
4420
4421- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4422 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4423
4424- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4425
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004426
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004427What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004428===========================
4429
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004430*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4431
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004432Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004433--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004434
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004435- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004436 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004437 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004438 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4439 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004440 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4441 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004442 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4443 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004444
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004445- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4446 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4447
4448- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4449 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4450
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004451Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004452-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004453
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004454- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4455 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4456 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4457 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4458 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4459 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4460 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4461 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4462
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004463- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4464 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4465 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4466 example).
4467
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004468- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004469 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004470 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004471 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004472
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004473- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4474 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4475 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004476 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004477
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004478- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4479 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4480 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4481 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4482 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4483 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4484
4485 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4486
4487 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4488
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004489Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004490-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004491
4492- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4493
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004494- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4495
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004496- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4497 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004498
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004499- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4500 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4501 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4502 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4503 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4504 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004505 attributes.
4506
4507- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4508 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4509 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004510
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004511- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4512 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4513 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004514
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004515- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4516 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4517 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004518 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4519 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4520
4521- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4522 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004523
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004524Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004525-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004526
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004527- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4528 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4529
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004530- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4531 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4532 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4533 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4534
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004535- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4536 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4537 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4538 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4539
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004540 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4541 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4542 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4543 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4544 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4545 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4546 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4547 without losing information).
4548
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004549- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004550 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4551 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4552 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4553 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4554 module).
4555
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004556 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004557 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4558 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4559 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4560 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004561
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004562- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004563 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4564 encoding.
4565
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004566- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4567 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4568
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004569- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004570 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4571
4572- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4573 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4574 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4575 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4576
4577- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4578
4579- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4580 ON, and OFF.
4581
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004582- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4583 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4584
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004585Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004586-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004587
4588- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4589 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4590 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004591
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004592- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4593 been added: -X and -E.
4594
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004595Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004596-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004597
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004598- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4599 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4600
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004601C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004602-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004603
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004604- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4605 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4606 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4607 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4608 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4609
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004610- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4611 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4612 as long) arguments.
4613
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004614- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4615 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4616 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4617 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4618 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4619 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4620
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004621- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4622 input.
4623
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004624New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004625-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004626
4627Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004628-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004629
4630Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004631-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004632
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004633- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4634 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4635 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4636
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004637- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4638 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4639 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004640 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004641
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004642 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4643 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4644 import signal
4645 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004646
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004647 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004648 while 1:
4649 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004650 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004651 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4652 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4653 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4654 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004655
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004656
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004657What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4658===========================
4659
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004660*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4661
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004662Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004663--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004664
4665- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4666 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4667 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4668
4669- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4670 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4671 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4672 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4673 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4674 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4675 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004676
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004677- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004678 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004679 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4680 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4681 associate a docstring with a property.
4682
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004683- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4684 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4685 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4686 other built-in object types.
4687
4688- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4689 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4690 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4691 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4692 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4693
4694- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4695 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4696
4697- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4698 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004699 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004700 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4701 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4702 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4703 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4704 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4705
4706- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4707 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4708 class.
4709
4710- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4711 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4712 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4713 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4714
4715- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4716 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4717 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4718 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4719
4720- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4721 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4722
4723- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4724 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4725 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4726 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4727 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004728 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004729 with the same value as s.
4730
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004731- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4732
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004733Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004734----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004735
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004736- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4737
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004738- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4739 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4740 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4741 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4742 objects.
4743
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004744- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4745 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004746 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4747 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4748
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004749- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4750 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4751 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4752
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004753Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004754-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004755
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004756- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4757 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4758 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4759 by the instances.
4760
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004761- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4762 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4763 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4764
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004765- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4766 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4767 before the entire comparison is complete.
4768
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004769- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4770 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4771 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4772
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004773- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4774 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4775 getwriter().
4776
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004777- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4778 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4779
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004780- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004781 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4782 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4783
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004784- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4785 iterable object.
4786
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004787- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4788 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004789
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004790- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4791 authentication.
4792
4793- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4794 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004795
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004796- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004797 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4798 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4799 a sample driver.)
4800
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004801Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004802-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004803
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004804- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4805 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4806 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4807 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4808 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4809 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4810 kernel has large file support.
4811
4812- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4813 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4814 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4815 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4816 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4817
4818- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4819 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4820 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4821
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004822C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004823-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004824
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004825- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4826 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4827
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004828New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004829-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004830
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004831- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4832 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4833
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004834Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004835-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004836
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004837- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4838 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4839 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4840 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4841 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4842
4843- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4844 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4845 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4846 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4847
4848- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4849 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4850
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004851Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004852-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004853
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004854- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004855 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4856 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004857
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004858
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004859What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4860===========================
4861
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004862*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4863
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004864Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004865----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004866
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004867- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4868 big to represent as a C double.
4869
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004870- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4871 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4872 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4873 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4874 restriction).
4875
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004876- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4877 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4878 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4879 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4880 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4881
4882 >>> dir([])
4883 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4884 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4885 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4886 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4887 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4888 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4889 'reverse', 'sort']
4890
4891 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4892
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004893- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004894 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4895 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4896 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4897 OverflowError exception.
4898
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004899- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004900 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004901 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4902 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4903 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4904 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4905 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004906 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004907 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4908 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4909
4910 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4911 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4912 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4913 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004914
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004915- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004916 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4917 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4918 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4919 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4920 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4921 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4922 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4923 once it is created.
4924
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004925- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4926 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4927 (key, value) pairs.
4928
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004929- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004930 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4931 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4932
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004933- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4934 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4935 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4936 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4937 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004938
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004939- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004940 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4941 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4942
4943 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4944
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004945- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004946 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4947
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004948Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004949-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004950
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004951- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004952 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4953 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004954
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004955- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4956 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4957 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4958 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4959 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4960 in this area anymore).
4961
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004962- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4963 threading.Timer.
4964
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004965- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4966 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4967
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004968- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004969 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4970
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004971- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004972 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4973 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4974 converted to Python longs.
4975
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004976- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004977 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4978
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004979- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4980 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4981 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4982
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004983Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004984-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004985
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004986- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4987 division operators as per PEP 238.
4988
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004989Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004990-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004991
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004992- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4993 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4994 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4995 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4996
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004997C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004998-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004999
5000- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005001
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005002- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5003 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005004 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005005
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005006 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5007 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005008 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005009 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005010
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005011- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005012 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5013 module:
5014
5015 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005016
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005017 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5018 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005019
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005020 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5021 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005022
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005023 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5024
5025 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5026
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005027- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005028 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5029 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5030 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005031
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005032New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005033-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005034
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005035- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5036 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5037 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5038 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5039 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005040
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005041Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005042-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005043
5044Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005045-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005046
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005047- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5048 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5049 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5050 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005051 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5052 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5053 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5054 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5055 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005056
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005057- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005058 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5059
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005060
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005061What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5062===========================
5063
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005064*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5065
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005066Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005067-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005068
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005069- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5070 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5071
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005072- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5073 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5074 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005075
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005076- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5077 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5078 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5079 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005080
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005081- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5082
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005083- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005084
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005085Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005086-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005087
5088- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005089 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005090 the module docstring for details.
5091
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005092Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005093-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005094
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005095- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005096 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5097 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5098 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005099
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005100- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5101 Nick Mathewson.
5102
5103Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005104----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005105
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005106- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5107 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5108 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5109 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5110 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5111 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5112 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5113 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5114
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005115- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5116 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5117 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5118 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5119
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005120- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5121 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5122 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5123 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5124 come a long way).
5125
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005126- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5127 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5128 write filters for these warnings).
5129
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005130- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5131 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5132 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5133 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5134 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5135
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005136- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5137 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5138 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5139 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5140 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5141 older distribution.
5142
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005143Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005144-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005145
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005146- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5147 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005148 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005149
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005150- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5151 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5152 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5153
5154- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5155
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005156- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5157
5158- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5159
5160- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5161
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005162- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005163
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005164- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5165
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005166New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005167-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005168
5169C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005170-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005171
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005172- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5173 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5174 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5175 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5176 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5177 against buffer overruns.
5178
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005179- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005180 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5181 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005182 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5183 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5184 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5185
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005186- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5187 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5188 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5189 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5190 deprecated.
5191
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005192Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005193-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005194
5195- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5196 relevant is found.
5197
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005198
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005199What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005200===========================
5201
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005202*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5203
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005204Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005205----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005206
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005207- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5208 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5209 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5210 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5211 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5212 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5213 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5214 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005215 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005216 repaired.
5217
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005218- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005219 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005220 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5221 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5222 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5223 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5224 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5225 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5226 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5227 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5228
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005229- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5230 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5231 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5232 leading BMO character).
5233
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005234- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5235 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5236 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5237
5238 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5239 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5240 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005241
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005242 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5243 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5244 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5245 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5246 for various simple to use conversions.
5247
5248 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5249 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5250
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005251 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5252 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5253 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5254 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5255 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5256 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5257 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5258 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5259 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5260 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5261 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5262 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5263 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5264 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5265 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005266
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005267- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5268 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5269 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005270 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005271 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005272
5273 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005274 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5275 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5276 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5277 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5278 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005279 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5280 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005281
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005282 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5283 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5284 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005285 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005286
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005287- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5288 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5289 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5290 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5291 floating arithmetic,
5292
5293 x = 9007199254740992.0
5294 print long(x)
5295
5296 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5297 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5298 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5299 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5300 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5301 functions are of good quality).
5302
5303 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5304 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5305 algorithms to break.
5306
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005307- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5308 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5309 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5310 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5311 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5312 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5313 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5314 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5315 order.
5316
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005317- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5318 operation along the most common code paths.
5319
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005320- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5321 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5322
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005323- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5324 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5325 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5326 {}.update(UserDict())
5327
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005328- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5329 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5330 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5331 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5332 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5333 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5334 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5335 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5336
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005337- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005338 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005339
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005340 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005341 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5342 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005343 join() method of strings
5344 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005345 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5346 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005347 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005348 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005349
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005350- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5351 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5352
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005353- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5354 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5355
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005356- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5357 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5358 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5359 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5360
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005361- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5362 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005363 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005364 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5365 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005366
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005367- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5368
5369
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005370Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005371-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005372
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005373- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005374 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005375 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5376 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5377
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005378- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5379 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5380
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005381- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5382 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5383 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5384 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5385
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005386- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5387 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5388 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5389
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005390- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5391
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005392- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5393
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005394- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5395 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5396 that are still imported into string.py).
5397
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005398- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5399
5400- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5401 Now it does.
5402
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005403- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5404
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005405- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5406 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5407 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5408 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5409 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005410 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5411 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005412
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005413- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5414 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5415 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5416 'help(object)'.
5417
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005418Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005419-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005420
5421- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005422 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005423 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5424 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5425
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005426- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005427 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5428 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005429
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005430C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005431-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005432
5433- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5434 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005435
5436----
5437
5438**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**