blob: 9b5740b53023264b98a5f40a184cbcdece9e7b6c [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2006*
11
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000012Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Martin v. Löwis18e16552006-02-15 17:27:45 +000015- PEP 353: Using ssize_t as the index type.
16
Neal Norwitzfc76d632006-01-10 06:03:13 +000017- Patch #1400181, fix unicode string formatting to not use the locale.
18 This is how string objects work. u'%f' could use , instead of .
19 for the decimal point. Now both strings and unicode always use periods.
20
Neal Norwitz671b9e32006-01-09 07:07:12 +000021- Bug #1244610, #1392915, fix build problem on OpenBSD 3.7 and 3.8.
22 configure would break checking curses.h.
23
Georg Brandlcd4d1e82005-12-27 17:37:07 +000024- Bug #959576: The pwd module is now builtin. This allows Python to be
25 built on UNIX platforms without $HOME set.
26
Neal Norwitzc10978f2005-12-19 06:07:16 +000027- Bug #1072182, fix some potential problems if characters are signed.
28
Neal Norwitz5d0ad502005-12-19 04:27:42 +000029- Bug #889500, fix line number on SyntaxWarning for global declarations.
30
Neal Norwitzdb83eb32005-12-18 05:29:30 +000031- Bug #1378022, UTF-8 files with a leading BOM crashed the interpreter.
32
Neal Norwitze7214a12005-12-18 05:03:17 +000033- Support for converting hex strings to floats no longer works.
34 This was not portable. float('0x3') now raises a ValueError.
35
Barry Warsaw2a38a862005-12-18 01:27:35 +000036- Patch #1382163: Expose Subversion revision number to Python. New C API
37 function Py_GetBuildNumber(). New attribute sys.build_number. Build number
38 is now displayed in interactive prompt banner.
39
Georg Brandlfa166682005-12-17 21:45:17 +000040- Implementation of PEP 341 - Unification of try/except and try/finally.
41 "except" clauses can now be written together with a "finally" clause in
Neal Norwitz11ca77e2005-12-17 22:24:12 +000042 one try statement instead of two nested ones. Patch #1355913.
Georg Brandlfa166682005-12-17 21:45:17 +000043
Hye-Shik Chang835b2432005-12-17 04:38:31 +000044- Bug #1379994: Builtin unicode_escape and raw_unicode_escape codec
45 now encodes backslash correctly.
46
Martin v. Löwisb45b3152005-11-28 17:34:23 +000047- Patch #1350409: Work around signal handling bug in Visual Studio 2005.
48
Georg Brandlf06e30a2005-11-24 15:37:42 +000049- Bug #1281408: Py_BuildValue now works correct even with unsigned longs
50 and long longs.
51
Neal Norwitz67715f02005-11-09 06:59:35 +000052- SF Bug #1350188, "setdlopenflags" leads to crash upon "import"
53 It was possible dlerror() returns a NULL pointer, use a default error
54 message in this case.
55
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +000056- Replaced most Unicode charmap codecs with new ones using the
57 new Unicode translate string feature in the builtin charmap
58 codec; the codecs were created from the mapping tables available
59 at ftp.unicode.org and contain a few updates (e.g. the Mac OS
60 encodings now include a mapping for the Apple logo)
61
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +000062- Added a few more codecs for Mac OS encodings
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +000063
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +000064- Speed up some Unicode operations.
65
66- A new AST parser implementation was completed.
67
Neal Norwitzb6570f52005-10-21 06:26:10 +000068- SF bug #1167751: fix incorrect code being for generator expressions.
Neal Norwitz16af7342005-10-21 06:25:33 +000069 The following code now raises a SyntaxError: foo(a = i for i in range(10))
70
Neal Norwitz708e51a2005-10-03 04:48:15 +000071- SF Bug #976608: fix SystemError when mtime of an imported file is -1.
72
Neal Norwitz11bd1192005-10-03 00:54:56 +000073- SF Bug #887946: fix segfault when redirecting stdin from a directory.
74 Provide a warning when a directory is passed on the command line.
75
Neal Norwitz40d37812005-10-02 01:48:49 +000076- Fix segfault with invalid coding.
77
78- SF bug #772896: unknown encoding results in MemoryError.
79
Raymond Hettinger6b27cda2005-09-24 21:23:05 +000080- All iterators now have a Boolean value of true. Formerly, some iterators
81 supported a __len__() method which evaluated to False when the iterator
82 was empty.
83
Guido van Rossum630db602005-09-20 18:49:54 +000084- On 64-bit platforms, when __len__() returns a value that cannot be
85 represented as a C int, raise OverflowError.
86
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000087- test__locale is skipped on OS X < 10.4 (only partial locale support is
Walter Dörwald6611a8b2005-10-09 19:28:35 +000088 present).
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000089
Georg Brandl80bbf3f2005-09-14 19:38:29 +000090- SF bug #893549: parsing keyword arguments was broken with a few format
91 codes.
92
Guido van Rossum8ee3e5a2005-09-14 18:09:42 +000093- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on AIX 5.3
94 with IBM's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1284289). This also closes SF
95 bug #105470: test_pwd fails on 64bit system (Opteron).
96
Guido van Rossum539c6622005-09-14 17:49:54 +000097- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on HP-UX 11 on
98 Itanium2 with HP's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1225212).
99
Georg Brandl4550b8d2005-08-26 06:43:52 +0000100- Disallow keyword arguments for type constructors that don't use them
Georg Brandl02c42872005-08-26 06:42:30 +0000101 (fixes bug #1119418).
102
Martin v. Löwisd35edda2005-08-24 08:39:24 +0000103- Forward UnicodeDecodeError into SyntaxError for source encoding errors.
104
Barry Warsawe2eca0b2005-08-15 18:14:19 +0000105- SF bug #900092: When tracing (e.g. for hotshot), restore 'return' events for
106 exceptions that cause a function to exit.
107
Raymond Hettinger9f1a6792005-07-31 01:16:36 +0000108- The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
109 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
110 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
111
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +0000112- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
113
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +0000114- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
115 reference counts in some error exit cases.
116
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000117- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
118 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
119 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
120 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
121 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
122 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
123 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
124 realloc.
125
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +0000126- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
127 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
128
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +0000129- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
130 like their int counterparts.
131
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +0000132- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
133 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
134 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
135 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
136 for a longer write-up of the problem).
137
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +0000138- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
139 serializing floats.
140
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +0000141- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
142 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
143 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
144
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +0000145- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
146 278.
147
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000148- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
149 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
150 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
151 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000152 to the base class has been moved to the proper nb_* magic slot and out of
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000153 PyNumber_*().
154 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
155
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +0000156- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
157 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
158 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
159 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
160
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +0000161- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
162 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
163 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
164 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
165 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
166
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +0000167- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
168 disabled caused a crash.
169
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000170- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
171 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
172
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000173- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +0000174 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
175
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +0000176- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
177
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000178- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +0000179 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
180 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
181 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000182
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +0000183- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
184
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +0000185- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
186 returning None.
187
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000188- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +0000189 ('\') with a specific error message.
190
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +0000191- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
192
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +0000193- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
194 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
195
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000196- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000197 an ferror() call.
198
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000199- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
200 list.sort().
201
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000202- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
203 (2+3) --> (5).
204
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000205- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
206
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000207- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
208 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000209
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000210- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
211 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
212 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
213
Neil Schemenauercf52c072005-08-12 17:34:58 +0000214- Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a
215 unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and
216 calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance.
217
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000218Extension Modules
219-----------------
220
Neal Norwitz082b2df2006-02-07 07:04:46 +0000221- Bug #876637, prevent stack corruption when socket descriptor
222 is larger than FD_SETSIZE.
223
Neal Norwitz0e6bc8c2006-02-05 05:45:43 +0000224- Patch #1407135, bug #1424041: harmonize mmap behavior of anonymous memory.
225 mmap.mmap(-1, size) now returns anonymous memory in both Unix and Windows.
226 mmap.mmap(0, size) should not be used on Windows for anonymous memory.
227
Martin v. Löwis57a34e82006-02-04 19:12:37 +0000228- Patch #1422385: The nis module now supports access to domains other
229 than the system default domain.
230
Martin v. Löwis14694662006-02-03 12:54:16 +0000231- Use Win32 API to implement os.stat/fstat. As a result, subsecond timestamps
232 are reported, the limit on path name lengths is removed, and stat reports
233 WindowsError now (instead of OSError).
234
Gregory P. Smithcfc4a8d2006-01-29 19:46:23 +0000235- Add bsddb.db.DBEnv.set_tx_timestamp allowing time based database recovery.
236
Neal Norwitz62a21122006-01-25 05:21:55 +0000237- Bug #1413192, fix seg fault in bsddb if a transaction was deleted
238 before the env.
239
Martin v. Löwis11017b12006-01-14 18:12:57 +0000240- Patch #1103116: Basic AF_NETLINK support.
241
Neal Norwitz3b4fff82006-01-11 08:54:45 +0000242- Bug #1402308, (possible) segfault when using mmap.mmap(-1, ...)
243
Neal Norwitz88bbd732006-01-10 07:05:44 +0000244- Bug #1400822, _curses over{lay,write} doesn't work when passing 6 ints.
245 Also fix ungetmouse() which did not accept arguments properly.
246 The code now conforms to the documented signature.
247
Neal Norwitz5e3d8622006-01-09 06:24:35 +0000248- Bug #1400115, Fix segfault when calling curses.panel.userptr()
249 without prior setting of the userptr.
250
Neal Norwitz40c6b472006-01-05 05:43:35 +0000251- Fix 64-bit problems in bsddb.
252
Neal Norwitz8856fb72005-12-18 03:34:22 +0000253- Patch #1365916: fix some unsafe 64-bit mmap methods.
254
Hye-Shik Changc5c57e62005-12-12 11:48:32 +0000255- Bug #1290333: Added a workaround for cjkcodecs' _codecs_cn build
256 problem on AIX.
257
Georg Brandla13c2442005-11-22 19:30:31 +0000258- Bug #869197: os.setgroups rejects long integer arguments
259
Neal Norwitz0f46bbf2005-11-03 05:00:25 +0000260- Bug #1346533, select.poll() doesn't raise an error if timeout > sys.maxint
261
Neal Norwitz7b631792005-11-02 05:26:07 +0000262- Bug #1344508, Fix UNIX mmap leaking file descriptors
263
Neal Norwitzf3396542005-10-28 05:52:22 +0000264- Patch #1338314, Bug #1336623: fix tarfile so it can extract
265 REGTYPE directories from tarfiles written by old programs.
266
Gregory P. Smithe101df92006-01-24 20:09:45 +0000267- Patch #1407992, fixes broken bsddb module db associate when using
268 BerkeleyDB 3.3, 4.0 or 4.1.
269
270- Get bsddb module to build with BerkeleyDB version 4.4
271
272- Get bsddb module to build with BerkeleyDB version 3.2
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +0000273
Neal Norwitz484d9a42005-09-30 04:46:49 +0000274- Patch #1309009, Fix segfault in pyexpat when the XML document is in latin_1,
275 but Python incorrectly assumes it is in UTF-8 format
276
Georg Brandle677adc2005-09-29 13:40:49 +0000277- Fix parse errors in the readline module when compiling without threads.
278
Hye-Shik Chang9ceebd52005-09-24 14:58:47 +0000279- Patch #1288833: Removed thread lock from socket.getaddrinfo on
280 FreeBSD 5.3 and later versions which got thread-safe getaddrinfo(3).
281
Michael W. Hudson10402a32005-09-22 09:19:01 +0000282- Patches #1298449 and #1298499: Add some missing checks for error
283 returns in cStringIO.c.
284
Neal Norwitz058bde12005-09-21 06:44:25 +0000285- Patch #1297028: fix segfault if call type on MultibyteCodec,
286 MultibyteStreamReader, or MultibyteStreamWriter
287
Neal Norwitzcfe7dd92005-09-19 06:49:27 +0000288- Fix memory leak in posix.access().
289
Martin v. Löwis8b291e22005-09-18 08:17:56 +0000290- Patch #1213831: Fix typo in unicodedata._getcode.
291
Georg Brandlfb1ef852005-09-14 20:53:32 +0000292- Bug #1007046: os.startfile() did not accept unicode strings encoded in
293 the file system encoding.
294
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000295- Patch #756021: Special-case socket.inet_aton('255.255.255.255') for
296 platforms that don't have inet_aton().
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000297
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000298- Bug #1215928: Fix bz2.BZ2File.seek() for 64-bit file offsets.
299
300- Bug #1191043: Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines for files containing one
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000301 line without newlines.
302
Georg Brandl38387b82005-08-24 07:17:40 +0000303- Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did
304 on Windows.
305
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000306- Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
Martin v. Löwisebd9d5b2005-08-09 15:00:59 +0000307 st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
308
Michael W. Hudson8137bea2005-07-27 20:24:40 +0000309- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
310 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
311 for large or negative values.
312
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000313- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000314 implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false.
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000315
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000316- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
317
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000318- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
319 if available on the platform.
320
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000321- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
322 available on the platform.
323
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000324- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
325 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
326
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000327- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
328
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000329- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
330 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
331 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
332
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000333- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
334
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000335- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
336 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
337
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000338- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000339 file size.
340
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000341- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
342
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000343- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
344 {remove_history,replace_history}
345
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000346- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
347 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000348
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000349- stat_float_times is now True.
350
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000351- array.array objects are now picklable.
352
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000353- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
354 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
355
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000356- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
357 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
358 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
359
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000360- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
361 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000362
363Library
364-------
365
Georg Brandl0e1abe22006-02-17 09:48:14 +0000366- Bug #1432260: The names of lambda functions are now properly displayed
367 in pydoc.
Georg Brandl501dd0d2006-02-17 09:45:40 +0000368
Martin v. Löwis00756902006-02-05 17:09:41 +0000369- Patch #1412872: zipfile now sets the creator system to 3 (Unix)
370 unless the system is Win32.
371
Martin v. Löwisc81e3a62006-01-30 15:04:31 +0000372- Patch #1349118: urllib now supports user:pass@ style proxy
Martin v. Löwis3e865952006-01-24 15:51:21 +0000373 specifications, raises IOErrors when proxies for unsupported protocols
374 are defined, and uses the https proxy on https redirections.
375
Georg Brandl531ceba2006-01-21 07:20:56 +0000376- Bug #902075: urllib2 now supports 'host:port' style proxy specifications.
377
378- Bug #1407902: Add support for sftp:// URIs to urlparse.
Georg Brandl89f35ac2006-01-20 17:24:23 +0000379
Georg Brandlb709c2c2006-01-20 09:07:35 +0000380- Bug #1371247: Update Windows locale identifiers in locale.py.
381
Neal Norwitzf60cd472006-01-14 07:05:13 +0000382- Bug #1394565: SimpleHTTPServer now doesn't choke on query parameters
Georg Brandl45ab2332006-01-13 17:05:56 +0000383 any more.
Georg Brandlb709c2c2006-01-20 09:07:35 +0000384
Georg Brandl4edd9892006-01-13 16:59:46 +0000385- Bug #1403410: The warnings module now doesn't get confused
386 when it can't find out the module name it generates a warning for.
Georg Brandlb709c2c2006-01-20 09:07:35 +0000387
Martin v. Löwis412ed3b2006-01-08 10:45:39 +0000388- Patch #1177307: Added a new codec utf_8_sig for UTF-8 with a BOM signature.
389
Neal Norwitzab86f8e2005-12-23 21:44:36 +0000390- Patch #1157027: cookielib mishandles RFC 2109 cookies in Netscape mode
391
Neal Norwitz338e7862005-12-23 21:27:46 +0000392- Patch #1117398: cookielib.LWPCookieJar and .MozillaCookieJar now raise
393 LoadError as documented, instead of IOError. For compatibility,
394 LoadError subclasses IOError.
395
Brett Cannon3cbd0382005-12-16 22:49:23 +0000396- Added the hashlib module. It provides secure hash functions for MD5 and
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000397 SHA1, 224, 256, 384, and 512. Note that recent developments make the
398 historic MD5 and SHA1 unsuitable for cryptographic-strength applications.
399 In <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-December/058850.html>
400 Ronald L. Rivest offered this advice for Python:
401
402 "The consensus of researchers in this area (at least as
403 expressed at the NIST Hash Function Workshop 10/31/05),
404 is that SHA-256 is a good choice for the time being, but
405 that research should continue, and other alternatives may
406 arise from this research. The larger SHA's also seem OK."
Brett Cannon3cbd0382005-12-16 22:49:23 +0000407
Fredrik Lundh7e0aef02005-12-12 18:54:55 +0000408- Added a subset of Fredrik Lundh's ElementTree package. Available
409 modules are xml.etree.ElementTree, xml.etree.ElementPath, and
410 xml.etree.ElementInclude, from ElementTree 1.2.6.
411
Martin v. Löwis307021f2005-11-27 16:59:04 +0000412- Patch #1162825: Support non-ASCII characters in IDLE window titles.
413
Georg Brandl1f663572005-11-26 16:50:44 +0000414- Bug #1365984: urllib now opens "data:" URLs again.
415
Brett Cannonad07ff22005-11-23 02:15:50 +0000416- Patch #1314396: prevent deadlock for threading.Thread.join() when an exception
417 is raised within the method itself on a previous call (e.g., passing in an
418 illegal argument)
419
Brett Cannon5d0bf942005-11-02 23:04:26 +0000420- Bug #1340337: change time.strptime() to always return ValueError when there
421 is an error in the format string.
422
Georg Brandle8f24432005-10-03 14:16:44 +0000423- Patch #754022: Greatly enhanced webbrowser.py (by Oleg Broytmann).
424
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000425- Bug #729103: pydoc.py: Fix docother() method to accept additional
Georg Brandl8b813db2005-10-01 16:32:31 +0000426 "parent" argument.
427
Georg Brandlaa935172005-09-29 20:49:16 +0000428- Patch #1300515: xdrlib.py: Fix pack_fstring() to really use null bytes
429 for padding.
430
Georg Brandl80ba8e82005-09-29 20:16:07 +0000431- Bug #1296004: httplib.py: Limit maximal amount of data read from the
432 socket to avoid a MemoryError on Windows.
433
Matthias Klosef3f231f2005-09-20 07:02:49 +0000434- Patch #1166948: locale.py: Prefer LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE and LANG over LANGUAGE
435 to get the correct encoding.
436
437- Patch #1166938: locale.py: Parse LANGUAGE as a colon separated list of
438 languages.
439
Martin v. Löwis4ed67382005-09-18 08:34:39 +0000440- Patch #1268314: Cache lines in StreamReader.readlines for performance.
441
Brett Cannona783d062005-09-15 02:34:56 +0000442- Bug #1290505: Fix clearing the regex cache for time.strptime().
443
Martin v. Löwis5dbdc592005-08-27 10:07:56 +0000444- Bug #1167128: Fix size of a symlink in a tarfile to be 0.
445
Georg Brandl5a650a22005-08-26 08:51:34 +0000446- Patch #810023: Fix off-by-one bug in urllib.urlretrieve reporthook
447 functionality.
448
Martin v. Löwis8b595142005-08-25 11:03:38 +0000449- Bug #1163178: Make IDNA return an empty string when the input is empty.
450
Georg Brandl532efab2005-08-24 22:34:21 +0000451- Patch #848017: Make Cookie more RFC-compliant. Use CRLF as default output
452 separator and do not output trailing semicola.
453
Georg Brandlb9256022005-08-24 18:46:39 +0000454- Patch #1062060: urllib.urlretrieve() now raises a new exception, named
455 ContentTooShortException, when the actually downloaded size does not
456 match the Content-Length header.
457
Martin v. Löwis0a5d4a22005-08-24 14:55:22 +0000458- Bug #1121494: distutils.dir_utils.mkpath now accepts Unicode strings.
459
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000460- Bug #1178484: Return complete lines from codec stream readers
461 even if there is an exception in later lines, resulting in
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000462 correct line numbers for decoding errors in source code.
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000463
Georg Brandl6d2b3462005-08-24 07:36:17 +0000464- Bug #1192315: Disallow negative arguments to clear() in pdb.
465
Martin v. Löwisb813c532005-08-07 20:51:04 +0000466- Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
467
Georg Brandl649f8e72005-08-03 07:30:12 +0000468- Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
469 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
470
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000471- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
472 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
473 Tkdnd.
474
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000475- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
476 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
477
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000478- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
479 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
480
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000481- textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000482 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
483
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000484- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
485 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
486
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000487- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
488 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
489
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000490- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000491 it can be missing in embedded interpreters
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000492
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000493- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
494
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000495- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
496 error messages.
497
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000498- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
499
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000500- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
501 Bug #1224621.
502
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000503- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
504 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
505 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
506 terminates by raising StopIteration.
507
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000508- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
509
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000510- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
511 component of the path.
512
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000513- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
514 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
515 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
516 class at all.
517
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000518- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
519 files to PyPI.
520
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000521- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
522 them to PyPI.
523
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000524- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
525 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
526 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
527 work as expected.
528
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000529- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
530 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
531
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000532- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000533 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
534
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000535- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
536
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000537- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
538 to build.
539
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000540- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
541 symbolic links on Windows.
542
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000543- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000544 profile.py if available.
545
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000546- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
547
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000548- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
549 in LWPCookieJar.
550
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000551- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
552
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000553- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
554
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000555- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
556
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000557- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
558
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000559- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
560
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000561- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
562
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000563- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
564
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000565- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
566
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000567- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
568 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
569 be exploited in various ways.
570
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000571- Bug #1222790: in SimpleXMLRPCServer, set the reuse-address and close-on-exec
Andrew M. Kuchling3a976052005-12-04 15:07:41 +0000572 flags on the HTTP listening socket.
573
Andrew M. Kuchlinge63fde72005-12-04 15:36:57 +0000574- Bug #792570: SimpleXMLRPCServer had problems if the request grew too large.
575 Fixed by reading the HTTP body in chunks instead of one big socket.read().
576
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000577- Patches #893642, #1039083: add allow_none, encoding arguments to constructors of
Andrew M. Kuchling10a16de2005-12-04 16:34:40 +0000578 SimpleXMLRPCServer and CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler.
579
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000580- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
581
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000582- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
583
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000584- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
585
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000586- Enhancements to the csv module:
587
588 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000589 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000590 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000591 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
592 reporting.
593 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
594 dictates.
595 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000596 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000597 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000598 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
599 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000600 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
601 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000602 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000603 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
604 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
605 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
606 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
607 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
608 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
609 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
610 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
611 without first creating a dialect class.
612 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
613 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
614 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000615 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000616 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
617 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000618 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
619 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
620 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
621 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000622 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
623 This has been fixed.
624
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000625- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
626 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
627 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
628 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
629
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000630- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
631
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000632- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
633 (Bug #951915).
634
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000635- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
636 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
637 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000638 encoding alias table.
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000639
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000640- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
641
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000642- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
643 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
644
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000645- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
646
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000647- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
648
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000649- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
650
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000651- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
652
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000653- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
654
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000655- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
656 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
657 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
658
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000659- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000660 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000661
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000662- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
663 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
664 tokenizer with very long source lines.
665
Barry Warsaw538561e2006-01-01 21:48:54 +0000666- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called
667 immediately after creating the object, without any intervening
668 ``.decompress()`` calls.
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000669
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000670- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
671 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000672
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000673- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
674 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
675
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000676- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
677 correctly.
678
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000679- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
680 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
681 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
682 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
683 between two lines.
684
Walter Dörwalda47d1c02005-08-30 10:23:14 +0000685- Bug #1251300: On UCS-4 builds the "unicode-internal" codec will now complain
686 about illegal code points. The codec now supports PEP 293 style error
687 handlers.
688
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000689- Bug #1235646: ``codecs.StreamRecoder.next()`` now reencodes the data it reads
Walter Dörwaldc5238b82005-09-01 11:56:53 +0000690 from the input stream, so that the output is a byte string in the correct
691 encoding instead of a unicode string.
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000692
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000693- Bug #1202493: Fixing SRE parser to handle '{}' as perl does, rather than
694 considering it exactly like a '*'.
695
Walter Dörwald007f8df2005-10-09 19:42:27 +0000696- Bug #1245379: Add "unicode-1-1-utf-7" as an alias for "utf-7" to
697 ``encodings.aliases``.
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000698
Walter Dörwald09f0dd52005-11-21 19:10:07 +0000699- ` uu.encode()`` and ``uu.decode()`` now support unicode filenames.
700
Gustavo Niemeyer548148812006-01-31 18:34:13 +0000701- Patch #1413711: Certain patterns of differences were making difflib
702 touch the recursion limit.
703
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000704Build
705-----
706
Martin v. Löwis86d66262006-02-17 08:40:11 +0000707- Patch #1432345: Make python compile on DragonFly.
708
Martin v. Löwis856bf9a2006-02-14 20:42:55 +0000709- Build support for Win64-AMD64 was added.
710
Martin v. Löwisa55e55e2006-02-11 15:55:14 +0000711- Patch #1428494: Prefer linking against ncursesw over ncurses library.
712
Martin v. Löwisfd9a72a2006-01-08 10:07:33 +0000713- Patch #881820: look for openpty and forkpty also in libbsd.
714
Martin v. Löwis64c33dd2006-01-03 07:42:14 +0000715- The sources of zlib are now part of the Python distribution (zlib 1.2.3).
716 The zlib module is now builtin on Windows.
717
Martin v. Löwisd5845ec2005-12-30 12:31:38 +0000718- Use -xcode=pic32 for CCSHARED on Solaris with SunPro.
719
Martin v. Löwis147fbe52005-08-07 21:09:30 +0000720- Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
721 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
722
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000723- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
724 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
725
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000726- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
727 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
728 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000729 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000730
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000731- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
732 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
733 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
734
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000735- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
736
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000737- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
738 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
739
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000740- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
741 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
742 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
743 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
744 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
745 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
746 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
747 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
748
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000749- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
750 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
751 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
752 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
753
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000754C API
755-----
756
Raymond Hettingerbeb31012005-08-16 03:47:52 +0000757- Added a C API for set and frozenset objects.
758
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000759- Removed PyRange_New().
760
Walter Dörwaldd1c1e102005-10-06 20:29:57 +0000761- Patch #1313939: PyUnicode_DecodeCharmap() accepts a unicode string as the
762 mapping argument now. This string is used as a mapping table. Byte values
763 greater than the length of the string and 0xFFFE are treated as undefined
764 mappings.
765
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000766
767Tests
768-----
769
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000770- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000771
Hye-Shik Changaaa2f1d2005-12-10 17:44:27 +0000772- Patch #1276356: New resource "urlfetch" is implemented. This enables
773 even impatient people to run tests that require remote files.
774
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000775
776Documentation
777-------------
778
Georg Brandl8cb30772006-01-20 09:34:29 +0000779- Bug #1402224: Add warning to dl docs about crashes.
780
Georg Brandla3a93ae2006-01-20 09:14:36 +0000781- Bug #1396471: Document that Windows' ftell() can return invalid
782 values for text files with UNIX-style line endings.
783
Georg Brandl32252422005-09-14 20:42:00 +0000784- Bug #1274828: Document os.path.splitunc().
785
Georg Brandl79c122f2005-08-24 07:31:33 +0000786- Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py.
787
Georg Brandl6f2bbd32005-08-24 07:26:55 +0000788- Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation.
789
Georg Brandlf13c4ba2005-08-02 10:28:08 +0000790- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
791
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000792- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
793
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000794- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
795
796- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
797
798- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
799
800- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
801
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000802- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
803 Closes bug #1166582.
804
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000805- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
806 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
807 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
808
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000809Mac
810---
811
812
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000813New platforms
814-------------
815
816- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
817
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000818
819Tools/Demos
820-----------
821
Georg Brandl56897312005-08-24 18:32:30 +0000822- Added two new files to Tools/scripts: pysource.py, which recursively
823 finds Python source files, and findnocoding.py, which finds Python
824 source files that need an encoding declaration.
825 Patch #784089, credits to Oleg Broytmann.
826
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000827- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
828
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000829- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000830
Barry Warsaw538561e2006-01-01 21:48:54 +0000831- Fixed a display glitch in Pynche, which could cause the right arrow to
832 wiggle over by a pixel.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000833
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000834What's New in Python 2.4 final?
835===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000836
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000837*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000838
839Core and builtins
840-----------------
841
842- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
843 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
844 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
845
846
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000847What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
848==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000849
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000850*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000851
852Core and builtins
853-----------------
854
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000855- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
856 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
857 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
858
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000859
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000860Library
861-------
862
863- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
864 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
865 raised is re-raised.
866
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000867- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
868 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
869
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000870- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
871 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
872 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
873 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
874 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
875 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
876 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
877 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
878 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
879 by the slice are recomputed now.
880
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000881- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000882
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000883Build
884-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000885
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000886- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
887 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
888 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000889
890C API
891-----
892
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000893- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
894
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000895
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000896What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
897================================
898
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000899*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000900
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000901License
902-------
903
904The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
905is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
906changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
907Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
908intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
909durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
910the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
911License::
912
913 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
914
915says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
916to Python 2.1.1.
917
918The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
919License Version 2.
920
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000921Core and builtins
922-----------------
923
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000924- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
925 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
926 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
927 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
928 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
929 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
930 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
Andrew M. Kuchlingb2a739d2005-11-22 15:14:44 +0000931 ``AttributeError`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000932 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
933 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
934
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000935- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000936
937Extension Modules
938-----------------
939
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000940- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
941 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
942 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
943 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000944
945Library
946-------
947
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000948- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
949 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
950 returned.
951
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000952- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
953
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000954- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
955 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
956
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000957- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
958
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000959- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
960 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000961
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000962- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
963
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000964- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
965
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000966- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000967 the source code is updated and reloaded.
968
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000969Build
970-----
971
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000972- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000973
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000974What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
975================================
976
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000977*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000978
979Core and builtins
980-----------------
981
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000982- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000983 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
984
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000985- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
986 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
987 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
988 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
989
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000990- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
991 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
992
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000993- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
994 constant.
995
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000996- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
997 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
998 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
999 large), and to anomalies such as
1000 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
1001 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
1002 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
1003 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001004
1005Extension modules
1006-----------------
1007
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +00001008- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
1009 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +00001010 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
1011 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
1012 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001013
1014Library
1015-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +00001016
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +00001017- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +00001018 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +00001019 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
1020 --swig-cpp.
1021
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +00001022- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
1023 it is set.
1024
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +00001025- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +00001026
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +00001027- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
1028 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
1029 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
1030 Closes bug #1039270.
1031
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +00001032- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +00001033
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +00001034 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +00001035 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
1036 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
1037 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
1038 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
1039 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
1040 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
1041 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
1042 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
1043 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
1044 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
1045 + Updates to documentation.
1046
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +00001047- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
1048 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
1049 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
1050 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
1051
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +00001052- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001053
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +00001054- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
1055 applications should use the getmember function.
1056
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +00001057- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
1058
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +00001059- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
1060 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
1061 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
1062 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
1063 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
1064 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
1065 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
1066 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
1067 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
1068
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001069- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
1070 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +00001071 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001072
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +00001073- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
1074 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
1075 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
1076 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
1077 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
1078 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
1079 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
1080 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001081
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +00001082- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
1083 the new public features (of which there are many).
1084
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +00001085- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001086 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
1087 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
1088 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
1089 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +00001090 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001091
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +00001092- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
1093
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +00001094- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
1095 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
1096 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
1097 options.
1098
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +00001099- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
1100 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
1101 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
1102 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
1103 conditions under which non-string values work.
1104
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001105Build
1106-----
1107
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +00001108- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
1109 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
1110 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
1111
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +00001112- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
1113 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
1114 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
1115 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
1116 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001117
1118C API
1119-----
1120
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +00001121- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
1122 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
1123
1124- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
1125
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +00001126- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
1127 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
1128 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
1129 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
1130 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
1131 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
1132 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
1133 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
1134 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
1135
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +00001136- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
1137
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +00001138- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
1139 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
1140 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001141
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001142Tests
1143-----
1144
1145- test__locale ported to unittest
1146
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001147Mac
1148---
1149
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +00001150- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
1151 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
1152 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001153
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001154Tools/Demos
1155-----------
1156
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +00001157- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
1158 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
1159 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
1160 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
1161 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001162
1163
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001164What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
1165=================================
1166
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +00001167*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001168
1169Core and builtins
1170-----------------
1171
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001172- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001173 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
1174
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001175- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
1176 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
1177 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
1178 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
1179 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
1180 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
1181 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
1182 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001183 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
1184 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
1185 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
1186 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
1187 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001188
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +00001189- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
1190 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
1191 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
1192 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
1193 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
1194
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +00001195- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
1196
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +00001197- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
1198 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
1199
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +00001200- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
1201 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
1202 modified the list.
1203
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +00001204- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
1205 functions is now writable.
1206
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +00001207- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
1208 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
1209 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
1210 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
1211
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001212- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
1213 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
1214 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
1215 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
1216 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +00001217
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +00001218- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
1219 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
1220
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001221Extension modules
1222-----------------
1223
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001224- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
1225
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +00001226- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
1227 data.
1228
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001229- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
1230 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
1231 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
1232 supposed to have been truncated away.
1233
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +00001234- Added socket.socketpair().
1235
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +00001236- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
1237 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
1238
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001239- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +00001240 versions of Python, have now been removed.
1241
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001242Library
1243-------
1244
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001245- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001246 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001247
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +00001248- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
1249 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
1250
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +00001251- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
1252 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
1253
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001254- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
1255
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +00001256- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
1257 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +00001258
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +00001259- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
1260 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
1261
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +00001262- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
1263
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +00001264- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
1265
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +00001266- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
1267
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +00001268- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
1269 Percivall.
1270
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +00001271- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
1272 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
1273
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001274- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
1275 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
1276 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001277 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001278
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001279- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
1280 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
1281 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
1282 and exponent.
1283
1284- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
1285
1286- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +00001287 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001288 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
1289
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001290- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
1291 to the readline module.
1292
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001293- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001294 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
1295 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001296
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +00001297- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
1298 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
1299 contains symlinks.
1300
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +00001301- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
1302 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
1303
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +00001304- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
1305 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
1306 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1307
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001308- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
1309 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
1310 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
1311 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
1312 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
1313 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
1314 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
1315 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
1316 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
1317 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
1318 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
1319 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
1320 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
1321
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +00001322- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
1323
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001324Tools/Demos
1325-----------
1326
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001327- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
1328 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
1329
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +00001330- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
1331
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001332Build
1333-----
1334
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001335- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
1336 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
1337 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
1338 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
1339 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
1340 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
1341 plans to do so.
1342
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +00001343- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
1344 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
1345
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +00001346- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
1347 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
1348
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001349- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
1350 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
1351
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +00001352- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
1353 GNU/k*BSD systems.
1354
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +00001355- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
1356 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
1357
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001358C API
1359-----
1360
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001361..
1362
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001363Documentation
1364-------------
1365
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001366- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1367 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1368
1369- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1370 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1371 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001372
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001373New platforms
1374-------------
1375
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001376- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1377
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001378Tests
1379-----
1380
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001381..
1382
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001383Windows
1384-------
1385
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001386- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1387 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1388 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1389 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1390 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1391 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1392 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1393 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1394 the problem.
1395
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001396Mac
1397---
1398
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001399..
1400
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001401
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001402What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1403=================================
1404
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001405*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001406
1407Core and builtins
1408-----------------
1409
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001410- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1411 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1412 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1413 sensitive code.
1414
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001415- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001416 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001417
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001418 @staticmethod
1419 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001420
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001421 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001422
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001423- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1424 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1425 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1426 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1427 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1428 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1429 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1430 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1431 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1432 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1433 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1434
1435 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1436 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1437 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1438 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1439 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1440 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1441 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1442
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001443- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1444 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1445
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001446- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001447 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001448
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001449- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001450 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001451 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1452
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001453- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001454 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1455 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1456
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001457- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1458 types that support garbage collection.
1459
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001460- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1461
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001462- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1463 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1464 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1465 Jython.
1466
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001467- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1468
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001469- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1470 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1471
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001472- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1473 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1474 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001475
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001476- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1477 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1478 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1479
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001480Extension modules
1481-----------------
1482
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001483- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1484
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001485Library
1486-------
1487
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001488- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1489 TIS-620
1490
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001491- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1492 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1493 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1494 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1495 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1496 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1497 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1498 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1499 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1500 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1501
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001502- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1503
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001504- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1505 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1506 same as when the argument is omitted).
1507 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1508
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001509- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1510
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001511- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1512 schemes are offered.
1513
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001514- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1515
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001516- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1517 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1518 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1519
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001520- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1521
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001522- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1523 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1524
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001525- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1526 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1527 when dummy_threading is being used.
1528
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001529- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1530 from a tarfile.
1531
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001532- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001533 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001534
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001535- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1536 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1537 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1538 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1539
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001540- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1541 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1542
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001543- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1544 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1545 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1546 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1547 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1548 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1549 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1550 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1551 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1552 by some other method in progress).
1553
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001554- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1555 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1556 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001557
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001558- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1559
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001560- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1561 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1562 AM Kuchling.
1563
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001564- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1565 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1566 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1567
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001568- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1569 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1570 instead of unsigned.
1571
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001572- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001573 no longer part of the public API.
1574
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001575- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1576 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1577 string methods of the same name).
1578
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001579- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001580 SF patch 945642.
1581
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001582- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1583
1584 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1585
1586 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1587 DocTestSuites.
1588
1589- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1590 that provide thread-local data.
1591
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001592- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1593 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1594
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001595- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1596
1597- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1598 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1599 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1600
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001601- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1602
1603 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1604 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1605 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001606
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001607 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1608 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1609 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1610 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1611
1612 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1613 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1614
1615 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1616 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1617 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1618 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1619
1620 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1621 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1622 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1623 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1624 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1625
1626 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1627 wrapping help output.
1628
1629 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1630 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1631 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001632
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001633C API
1634-----
1635
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001636- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1637 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1638 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1639 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1640 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1641 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1642 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1643 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1644 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1645 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1646 its visible semantics have not changed.
1647
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001648- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1649 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1650
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001651Documentation
1652-------------
1653
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001654- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001655
1656 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001657 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001658
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001659 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001660
1661 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1662
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001663- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001664
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001665Tests
1666-----
1667
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001668- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001669 platforms that use the Makefile.
1670
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001671- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1672 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1673 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1674
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001675
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001676What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1677=================================
1678
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001679*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001680
1681Core and builtins
1682-----------------
1683
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001684- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1685 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1686 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1687 objects now (one object instead of three).
1688
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001689- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1690 Windows DLLs.
1691
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001692- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1693 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001694
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001695- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1696 a new .pyc magic.
1697
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001698- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1699 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1700 be there.
1701
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001702- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1703 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1704 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1705
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001706- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1707 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1708 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1709
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001710- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1711
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001712- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1713 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1714 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001715
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001716- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1717 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1718
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001719- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1720
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001721- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001722 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001723
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001724- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1725
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001726- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1727
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001728- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1729 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1730
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001731- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1732 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1733 Fixes bug #858016 .
1734
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001735- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1736 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1737 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1738
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001739- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1740 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1741 improves their performance (about 35%).
1742
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001743- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1744 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1745 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1746
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001747- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1748 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1749 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1750 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1751
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001752- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1753 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001754 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001755 length is not known).
1756
1757- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1758 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001759 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1760 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001761 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1762
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001763- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1764 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1765
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001766- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1767 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1768 keyword arguments.
1769
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001770- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1771 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1772 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1773
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001774- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1775 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1776 cases.
1777
1778- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1779 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1780 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1781 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1782 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1783 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1784 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1785 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1786 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1787 a release build.
1788
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001789- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1790 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1791
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001792- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001793 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001794
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001795- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1796 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1797 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1798 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1799 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1800 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1801 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1802 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1803 destroyed.
1804
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001805- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1806 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1807 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1808 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1809 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1810 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1811 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1812 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1813
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001814- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1815 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1816 character other than a space.
1817
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001818- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1819 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1820 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1821 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1822 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1823 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1824 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1825 attributes with the same name.
1826
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001827- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1828 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1829 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1830 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1831 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1832 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1833 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1834 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1835 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1836 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1837 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1838 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1839 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1840 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001841
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001842- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1843 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1844 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1845 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1846 This has been repaired.
1847
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001848- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1849
1850- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1851
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001852- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1853 over a sequence.
1854
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001855- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001856 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001857
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001858- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1859
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001860- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1861 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1862 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1863 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1864 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1865 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1866 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1867 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1868
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001869- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1870 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1871 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1872
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001873- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1874 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1875 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1876 freelist.
1877
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001878- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1879 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1880
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001881- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1882 number.
1883
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001884- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1885 a TypeError exception.
1886
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001887- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1888 820195.
1889
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001890- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1891 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1892 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1893
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001894- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001895 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1896 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001897
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001898- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1899 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1900 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1901
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001902- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1903 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001904 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001905
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001906- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001907 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1908 the first call.
1909
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001910
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001911Extension modules
1912-----------------
1913
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001914- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1915 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1916
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001917- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1918 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1919 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1920 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1921 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1922 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1923 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001924
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001925- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1926
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001927- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1928
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001929- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1930 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1931
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001932- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1933 fewer false positives.
1934
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001935- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1936 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1937
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001938- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001939 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1940
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001941- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001942 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001943 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001944 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1945 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001946
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001947- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1948 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1949 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1950 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1951
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001952- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1953 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1954 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1955 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1956 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1957 #897625.
1958
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001959- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1960 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1961
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001962- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1963 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1964 and pops on either side of the deque.
1965
1966- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1967 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1968
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001969- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1970 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1971 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1972 other functions that expect a function argument.
1973
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001974- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1975
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001976- os.getsid was added.
1977
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001978- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1979 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1980 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1981
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001982- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1983
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001984- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1985
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001986- readline.clear_history was added.
1987
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001988- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1989
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001990- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1991
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001992- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1993
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001994- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1995
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001996- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1997
1998- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1999
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00002000- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
2001
2002- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
2003
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00002004- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
2005 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
2006 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
2007
2008- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
2009 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
2010 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
2011 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
2012 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
2013 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
2014 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
2015
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00002016- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
2017 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
2018 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
2019 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00002020
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002021- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00002022 iterators from a single iterable.
2023
2024- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
2025 of raising a TypeError exception.
2026
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00002027- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
2028 as parameter.
2029
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002030Library
2031-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00002032
Armin Rigoa871ef22006-02-08 12:53:56 +00002033- Added a new module: cProfile, a C profiler with the same interface as the
2034 profile module. cProfile avoids some of the drawbacks of the hotshot
2035 profiler and provides a bit more information than the other two profilers.
2036 Based on "lsprof" (patch #1212837).
2037
Georg Brandlf0de6a12005-08-22 18:02:59 +00002038- Bug #1266283: The new function "lexists" is now in os.path.__all__.
2039
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00002040- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
2041 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
2042 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002043
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00002044- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
2045 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
2046 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00002047
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00002048- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00002049
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00002050- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
2051 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00002052
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00002053- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
2054 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
2055
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00002056- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
2057
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00002058- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00002059 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00002060
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002061- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00002062 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002063
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00002064- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
2065
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00002066- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
2067 on cygwin and mingw32.
2068
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00002069- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
2070
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00002071- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
2072 module.
2073
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00002074- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
2075 installation scheme for all platforms.
2076
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00002077- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00002078 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00002079
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00002080- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
2081 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
2082 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
2083
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00002084- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
2085 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
2086 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
2087
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00002088- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
2089
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00002090- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
2091
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00002092- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
2093 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
2094
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00002095- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
2096 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
2097 type pattern with the same value exists.
2098
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00002099- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
2100 when run from the command prompt).
2101
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00002102- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
2103 not taken into consideration when caching value.
2104
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00002105- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
2106 default sort).
2107
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00002108- Added global runctx function to profile module
2109
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00002110- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
2111
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00002112- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
2113
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00002114- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
2115
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002116- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00002117 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
2118 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
2119 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
2120 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
2121 accordingly.
2122
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00002123- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
2124 decoding standards.
2125
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00002126- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
2127 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
2128 called for all requests.
2129
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00002130- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
2131 they are passed to the compiler.
2132
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00002133- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
2134 indent, width and depth.
2135
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00002136- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
2137 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
2138
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00002139- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
2140 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
2141
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00002142- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
2143
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00002144- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
2145
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00002146- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
2147
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00002148- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
2149 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
2150
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00002151- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00002152 for better performance.
2153
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002154- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00002155
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00002156- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
2157 a string).
2158
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00002159- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
2160
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00002161- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
2162
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00002163- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
2164
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00002165- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
2166
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00002167- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
2168 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
2169 list of fieldnames.
2170
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00002171- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
2172 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
2173
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00002174- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
2175
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00002176- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
2177 empty lists.
2178
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00002179- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
2180 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
2181 and shelves.
2182
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00002183- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
2184 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
2185
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002186- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00002187 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
2188 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002189
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00002190- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
2191 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00002192 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00002193
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002194- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00002195 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
2196 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
2197
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002198- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
2199 and removed in Py2.4.
2200
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00002201- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
2202
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00002203- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
2204
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002205Tools/Demos
2206-----------
2207
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00002208- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
2209 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
2210
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00002211- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
2212
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00002213- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
2214 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
2215 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
2216 destination in situations where both files are given.
2217
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00002218- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
2219 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
2220 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
2221 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
2222
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00002223- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
2224
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00002225- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
2226 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
2227 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
2228 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
2229 now.
2230
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002231- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
2232 in effect
2233
2234- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
2235 C-c C-h
2236
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00002237- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
2238 -d option was given.
2239
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002240Build
2241-----
2242
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00002243- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
2244 build under OS X.
2245
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00002246- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
2247 --enable-profiling.
2248
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00002249- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
2250 is configured --with-tsc.
2251
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00002252- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
2253 on AMD64.
2254
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00002255- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
2256 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
2257
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00002258- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
2259 removed.
2260
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00002261- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
2262 supported (see PEP 11).
2263
2264- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
2265
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00002266- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
2267
2268- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
2269 (see PEP 11).
2270
2271- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
2272 sizeof(char) must be 1.
2273
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002274C API
2275-----
2276
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00002277- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
2278 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
2279 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
2280
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00002281- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
2282 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
2283 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
2284 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
2285
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00002286- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
2287 generator objects.
2288
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002289- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
2290 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00002291 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
2292 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002293
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00002294- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
2295 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
2296
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00002297- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
2298 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
2299 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
2300 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
2301 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
2302
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00002303- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
2304 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
2305 about 10% faster.
2306
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00002307- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
2308 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
2309
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00002310- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
2311 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
2312 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
2313 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
2314
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002315Windows
2316-------
2317
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00002318- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
2319 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
2320 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
2321 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
2322
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00002323- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
2324 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
2325 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
2326
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002327
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002328What's New in Python 2.3 final?
2329===============================
2330
2331*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
2332
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002333IDLE
2334----
2335
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00002336- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
2337 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
2338 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
2339 context-menu actions.
2340
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002341- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
2342 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
2343 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
2344 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
2345 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
2346 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
2347 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
2348 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
2349 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
2350
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002351
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002352What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
2353=============================================
2354
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00002355*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002356
2357Core and builtins
2358-----------------
2359
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002360- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002361 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002362 comment at the end are still unsupported.
2363
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002364Extension modules
2365-----------------
2366
2367- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
2368 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
2369 than once. This has been fixed.
2370
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002371- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2372 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2373 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2374 call.
2375
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002376- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2377
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002378Library
2379-------
2380
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002381- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2382 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2383
2384- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2385 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2386 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2387 restored.
2388
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002389IDLE
2390----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002391
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002392- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002393
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002394Build
2395-----
2396
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002397- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2398 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2399
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002400C API
2401-----
2402
2403Windows
2404-------
2405
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002406- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2407 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2408
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002409- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2410
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002411Mac
2412---
2413
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002414- Various fixes to pimp.
2415
2416- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2417
2418- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2419 more problems than it solves.
2420
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002421
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002422What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2423=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002424
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002425*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2426
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002427Core and builtins
2428-----------------
2429
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002430- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2431 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2432
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002433- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2434 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002435 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002436
2437- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2438 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2439 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002440 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002441
2442- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2443 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002444
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002445- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2446 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2447 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2448
2449- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002450 770247.
2451
2452- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002453
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002454Extension modules
2455-----------------
2456
2457- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2458 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2459
2460- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2461
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002462- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2463
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002464- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2465 contained within the _strptime module.
2466
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002467- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2468 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2469
2470- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002471 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2472
2473- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2474 the find_class attribute, if present.
2475
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002476- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002477
2478 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2479 (SF bug 763298).
2480
2481 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002482 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2483 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2484 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002485
2486 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2487
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002488Library
2489-------
2490
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002491- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2492
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002493- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2494 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2495 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2496 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2497 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2498 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2499 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2500 or Tester().
2501
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002502- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2503 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2504 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2505 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2506 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2507 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2508 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2509 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2510 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002511
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002512 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002513
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002514- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2515 weren't before was an oversight.
2516
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002517- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2518 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2519
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002520- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2521 when there are no lines.
2522
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002523- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2524 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2525
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002526- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2527 to child processes.
2528
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002529- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2530
2531- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2532
2533- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2534 xmlrpclib.
2535
2536- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2537 responses.
2538
2539- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2540 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2541
2542- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2543 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2544 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2545
2546- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2547 used as patterns.
2548
2549- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2550 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2551 than Tk 8.3.
2552
2553- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2554
2555- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002556
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002557Tools/Demos
2558-----------
2559
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002560- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2561
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002562- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2563
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002564- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002565
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002566Build
2567-----
2568
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002569- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2570
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002571- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2572
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002573- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2574 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002575
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002576- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2577 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2578 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002579
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002580C API
2581-----
2582
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002583- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2584 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2585
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002586Windows
2587-------
2588
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002589- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2590 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2591 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2592 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2593 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2594 Python exception ::
2595
2596 thread.error: can't start new thread
2597
2598 is raised now.
2599
2600- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2601 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2602 instead of from DLL teardown.
2603
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002604Mac
2605---
2606
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002607- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002608 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002609 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2610 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2611 the executable in the bundle.
2612
2613- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002614
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002615- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2616
2617- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2618 on Panther.
2619
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002620What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2621================================
2622
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002623*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002624
2625Core and builtins
2626-----------------
2627
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002628- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2629 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2630 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2631 with the -i option.
2632
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002633- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2634 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2635
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002636- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2637 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2638
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002639- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2640 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2641 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2642 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2643 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2644 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2645 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2646 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2647 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2648 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2649 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2650 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2651 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002652
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002653- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2654 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2655 embedded in a lambda expression.
2656
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002657- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2658 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2659 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2660 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2661 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2662
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002663- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2664 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2665 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2666
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002667- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2668 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2669
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002670- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2671 It's writable again.
2672
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002673- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2674 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2675 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002676 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002677
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002678- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2679 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2680 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2681
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002682Extension modules
2683-----------------
2684
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002685- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2686 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2687
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002688- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2689 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2690 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2691 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2692
2693- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2694 collection.
2695
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002696- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2697 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2698 unique within a single program run.
2699
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002700- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2701 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2702
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002703- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2704 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2705
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002706- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2707 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002708
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002709- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2710
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002711- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2712 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2713
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002714- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2715 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2716 for many BSD-derived systems.
2717
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002718
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002719Library
2720-------
2721
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002722- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2723 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2724 primary ones:
2725
2726 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2727 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2728 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2729
2730 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2731 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2732 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2733 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2734 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2735 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2736
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002737- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2738 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2739 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2740 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2741 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2742 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2743 argument.
2744
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002745- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2746 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2747 in the archive.
2748
2749- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2750 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2751
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002752- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2753 569574).
2754
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002755- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2756 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2757 no more.
2758
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002759- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2760 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2761 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2762 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2763 code coverage.
2764
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002765- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2766 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2767 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002768 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2769 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002770
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002771- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2772 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2773 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002774 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002775
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002776- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2777
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002778- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2779 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2780 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2781 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2782
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002783- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2784 handling.
2785
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002786- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2787 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2788
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002789- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2790 in socket.py.
2791
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002792- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2793
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002794- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2795 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2796 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2797 opener with proxy support.
2798
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002799- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2800
2801- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2802
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002803Tools/Demos
2804-----------
2805
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002806- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2807
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002808- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2809
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002810- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2811 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002812
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002813- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2814 files.
2815
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002816Build
2817-----
2818
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002819- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002820 different root directory.
2821
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002822C API
2823-----
2824
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002825- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2826 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2827 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2828 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2829 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2830 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2831 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2832 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2833 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2834 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2835
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002836- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2837 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2838 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2839 from Python.
2840
2841
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002842New platforms
2843-------------
2844
2845None this time.
2846
2847Tests
2848-----
2849
2850- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2851 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2852
2853Windows
2854-------
2855
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002856- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2857
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002858- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2859 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2860 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2861 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2862 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2863 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2864 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2865 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2866 that's what it's for.
2867
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002868Mac
2869---
2870
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002871- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2872 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2873 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2874 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002875- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2876 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2877- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002878
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002879SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2880------------------------------------
2881
2882430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2883598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2884622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2885661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2886683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2887697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2888713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2889724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2890727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2891729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2892730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2893731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2894732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2895733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2896735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2897740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2898744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2899745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2900747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2901749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2902751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2903753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2904755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2905757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2906760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2907
2908
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002909What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2910================================
2911
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002912*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002913
2914Core and builtins
2915-----------------
2916
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002917- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2918 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2919
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002920- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2921 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2922 and cannot be strings).
2923
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002924- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2925 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2926 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2927 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2928
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002929- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2930 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2931 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2932 Python itself.
2933
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002934- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2935 the referenced object, if it has one.
2936
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002937- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2938 the thread started at
2939 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2940
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002941- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2942 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2943 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2944 placed on a list index.
2945
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002946- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2947 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2948 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2949 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2950
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002951- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2952 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2953 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2954 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2955 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2956 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2957 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2958
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002959- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2960 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2961 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2962 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2963 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2964
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002965- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2966 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002967
2968- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2969 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2970 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2971 #693195.)
2972
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002973- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2974 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002975
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002976- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002977 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002978 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2979 interpreter executions, would fail.
2980
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002981- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002982 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002983 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002984
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002985Extension modules
2986-----------------
2987
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002988- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2989 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2990 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2991 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2992
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002993- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2994 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2995
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002996- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2997 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2998 and Greg Chapman.)
2999
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00003000- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
3001 recursively.
3002
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00003003- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00003004 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
3005 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
3006 leaks.
3007
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00003008- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
3009
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00003010- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
3011 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
3012 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
3013 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
3014 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
3015 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
3016 #705836.
3017
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00003018- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00003019 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
3020
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00003021- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
3022 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
3023 See SF bug #692416.
3024
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00003025- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
3026 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
3027
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00003028- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
3029 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
3030 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003031
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00003032- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00003033 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
3034 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
3035
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00003036- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
3037 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
3038 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
3039 timeouts to work properly.
3040
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003041Library
3042-------
3043
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00003044- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
3045 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
3046 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
3047 future release.
3048
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00003049- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
3050 for querying platform dependent features.
3051
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00003052- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00003053
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00003054- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
3055 pickle protocol versions.
3056
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00003057- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
3058 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
3059 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
3060
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00003061- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
3062
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00003063- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
3064 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
3065 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
3066 modules.
3067
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00003068- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
3069 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
3070 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
3071
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00003072- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
3073 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
3074
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00003075- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
3076 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
3077 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
3078
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003079- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00003080 MS Office extensions.
3081
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00003082- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
3083 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
3084
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00003085- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
3086 execution speed of expressions and statements.
3087
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003088- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
3089 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
3090 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
3091 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
3092 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
3093 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
3094
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00003095- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
3096 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
3097 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003098
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00003099- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
3100 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
3101 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
3102
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00003103- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
3104
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00003105- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
3106 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
3107 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
3108
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003109Tools/Demos
3110-----------
3111
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00003112- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
3113 See the module docstring for details.
3114
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003115Build
3116-----
3117
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00003118- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
3119 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003120
3121C API
3122-----
3123
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003124- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
3125
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00003126- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
3127 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
3128 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
3129
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003130- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
3131 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00003132
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003133 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
3134 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
3135 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00003136
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00003137- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00003138 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
3139
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00003140- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
3141 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
3142 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003143
3144New platforms
3145-------------
3146
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00003147None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003148
3149Tests
3150-----
3151
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00003152- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
3153 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003154
3155Windows
3156-------
3157
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00003158- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
3159 function.
3160
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00003161- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
3162 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003163
3164Mac
3165---
3166
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00003167- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
3168 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00003169
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00003170- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
3171 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003172
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00003173- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
3174 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
3175 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003176
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003177- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00003178 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
3179 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003180
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003181- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
3182 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003183
3184
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003185What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
3186=================================
3187
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003188*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003189
3190Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003191-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003192
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00003193- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
3194 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
3195 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
3196
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00003197- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
3198 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
3199 (SF patch #664376.)
3200
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003201- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
3202 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
3203 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
3204 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
3205 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
3206 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00003207 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003208
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003209- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
3210 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
3211 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
3212 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003213 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003214
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00003215- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
3216 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
3217 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
3218 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
3219 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
3220 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
3221 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
3222 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
3223 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
3224 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
3225 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
3226
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00003227- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
3228 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
3229 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
3230 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
3231 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
3232 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
3233
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00003234- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
3235 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
3236
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00003237- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
3238 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
3239 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
3240 case.)
3241
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00003242- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
3243 passed as unicode strings.
3244
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00003245- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
3246 See SF bug #683467.
3247
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00003248- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
3249 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
3250
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00003251- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
3252
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00003253- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
3254
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00003255- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
3256 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
3257 arguments.
3258
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00003259- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
3260 See SF bug #667147.
3261
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003262- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003263 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003264 See SF bug #676155.
3265
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003266- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003267 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003268 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
3269 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
3270 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
3271 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
3272 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
3273 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003274
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003275Extension modules
3276-----------------
3277
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003278- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
3279 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3280 tp_as_number pointer.
3281
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003282- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
3283 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
3284 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
3285 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
3286 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
3287
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003288- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
3289
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00003290- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
3291
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003292- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00003293 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003294 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
3295 patch #678531.)
3296
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00003297- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
3298 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
3299
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00003300- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
3301 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
3302
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00003303- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
3304
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00003305- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
3306 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
3307 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
3308
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003309- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
3310
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003311- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
3312 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
3313
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003314- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003315
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003316- datetime changes:
3317
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00003318 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
3319
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003320 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
3321 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
3322 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
3323 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
3324 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
3325 now.
3326
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003327 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003328 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
3329 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003330
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003331 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003332 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003333 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
3334 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
3335 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
3336 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003337
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003338 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
3339 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
3340 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003341 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
3342
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003343 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
3344 by a later example coded by Guido.
3345
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003346 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003347 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
3348 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
3349 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003350 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
3351 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
3352
3353 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
3354 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
3355 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
3356 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
3357 tzinfo subclass instance.
3358
3359 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
3360 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
3361 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
3362 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
3363 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
3364 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
3365 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
3366 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003367
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003368 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
3369 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3370 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3371 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3372 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003373 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3374
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003375 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003376
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003377 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3378 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3379 as a naive datetime object.
3380
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003381 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3382 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3383 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3384
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003385 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3386 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3387 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3388 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3389 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3390 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3391 comparison.
3392
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003393 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3394 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3395 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3396 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003397 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003398
3399 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003400
3401 and ::
3402
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003403 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3404
3405 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3406 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3407 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3408 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3409
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003410 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3411 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3412 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3413 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3414 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3415
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003416 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3417 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003418 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3419 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003420
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003421Library
3422-------
3423
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003424- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3425 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3426
3427- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3428 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3429 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3430 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3431 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3432 See PEP 307 for details.
3433
3434- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3435 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3436
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003437- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3438 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003439 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003440 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3441 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003442 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003443
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003444- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3445 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3446
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003447- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3448 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3449 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3450
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003451- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3452
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003453- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3454 exception.
3455
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003456- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3457 class.
3458
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003459- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3460 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3461 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3462
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003463- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3464 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3465
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003466- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003467 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3468 See SF bug #659228.
3469
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003470- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3471 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3472 See SF patch #651082.
3473
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003474- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003475
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003476- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3477 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3478
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003479- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003480 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003481
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003482- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3483 DOS paths from other platforms.
3484
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003485Tools/Demos
3486-----------
3487
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003488- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3489 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3490 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3491 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3492 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3493 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3494 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3495 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3496 example:
3497
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003498 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3499 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003500
3501 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3502
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003503
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003504Build
3505-----
3506
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003507- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3508 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3509 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003510 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3511
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003512 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3513
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003514- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3515 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3516 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3517 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3518 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3519 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3520 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3521 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3522 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3523
3524- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3525 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3526 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3527 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3528
3529- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3530 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3531
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003532C API
3533-----
3534
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003535- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3536 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003537
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003538- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3539 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3540 tp_as_number pointer.
3541
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003542- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3543 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3544 (SF #681367)
3545
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003546- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3547 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3548 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3549 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003550
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003551Tests
3552-----
3553
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003554- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003555 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3556 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3557 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3558 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3559 pydoc.)
3560
3561- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3562
3563- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003564
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003565Windows
3566-------
3567
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003568- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3569 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3570 time).
3571
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003572- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3573 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3574
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003575- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3576 release without strong cryptography.
3577
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003578- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003579 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003580
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003581- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3582 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3583
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003584Mac
3585---
3586
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003587- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3588 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003589
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003590- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3591 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3592 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003593
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003594- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3595 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003596
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003597- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3598 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3599 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3600 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003601
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003602- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003603 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3604 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3605 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003606
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003607
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003608What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003609=================================
3610
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003611*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003612
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003613Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003614--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003615
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003616- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3617
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003618- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3619 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003620 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003621 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003622 a different meaning than before.
3623
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003624- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003625 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003626 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003627
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003628- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003629 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003630 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003631
3632- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3633 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3634 and deallocation.
3635
3636- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3637 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3638
3639- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3640 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3641 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3642 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3643 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3644
3645- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3646 now detected by the garbage collector.
3647
3648- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3649 [SF bug 519621]
3650
3651- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3652 identifier.
3653
3654- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3655 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3656 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3657 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3658 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3659 [SF bug 563060]
3660
3661- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3662 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3663 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3664 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3665 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3666
3667- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3668 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3669 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3670
3671- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3672
3673- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3674 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3675 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3676 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3677 state of the slots would be lost.)
3678
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003679Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003680-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003681
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003682- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003683 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3684 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3685 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3686 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003687 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3688 Jython 2.1.
3689
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003690- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003691 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003692 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3693 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3694 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3695 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3696 these, see PEP 302.
3697
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003698- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3699 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3700 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3701
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003702- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3703 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3704 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3705
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003706- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3707 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3708 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3709
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003710- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3711 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3712 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3713 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3714 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3715 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3716 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3717 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3718 releases or implementations.
3719
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003720- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003721 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3722 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003723
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003724- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3725 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3726
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003727- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3728 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3729 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3730
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003731- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3732 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3733
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003734- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3735 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003736 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3737 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003738
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003739- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3740 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3741 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3742 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3743 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3744
3745 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3746 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3747 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3748 pattern.
3749
3750 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3751 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3752 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3753 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3754
3755 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3756 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3757 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3758 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3759 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3760 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3761
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003762- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3763 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3764 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3765 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3766 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3767 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3768 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3769 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003770
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003771- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3772 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3773 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3774 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3775 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003776 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3777 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3778 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3779 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3780 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3781 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3782 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003783
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003784- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3785 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3786
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003787- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3788 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3789 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3790 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3791 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3792 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3793 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3794 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3795 to Zack Weinberg!
3796
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003797- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3798 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3799 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3800 type. This has been fixed now.
3801
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003802- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3803 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3804 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3805
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003806- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3807 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3808 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3809 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3810 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3811 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3812 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3813 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003814 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003815
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003816- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3817 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3818 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003819
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003820- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3821 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3822 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3823 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3824 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3825 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3826 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3827 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003828 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003829 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3830 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3831
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003832- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3833 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3834 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3835 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3836 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3837 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3838 this.)
3839
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003840- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3841 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003842 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003843 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003844 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3845 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003846 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3847 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003848
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003849- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3850 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3851 currently running.
3852
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003853- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3854 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3855 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3856 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3857
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003858- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3859 as directory names.
3860
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003861- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3862 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3863
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003864- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3865 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3866
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003867- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003868 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3869 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003870
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003871- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3872 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3873 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3874 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3875 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3876
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003877- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3878 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3879 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3880 removed.
3881
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003882- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3883 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3884 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3885
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003886- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3887 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3888 to __debug__.
3889
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003890- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3891 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3892 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3893
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003894- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3895 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3896 deprecated now.
3897
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003898- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3899 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3900 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003901
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003902- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3903 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3904 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3905 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3906 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003907
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003908- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3909 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3910
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003911- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3912 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3913 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003914 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003915 is backward compatible.
3916
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003917- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3918 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3919 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3920 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3921 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3922
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003923- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3924 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3925 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3926 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3927 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3928 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003929
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003930- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3931 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3932
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003933- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3934 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3935
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003936- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3937 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3938 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3939 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3940 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3941
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003942- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3943 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3944 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3945
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003946- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003947 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3948
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003949- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3950 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3951 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003952
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003953- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3954 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3955
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003956- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3957 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3958 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3959
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003960- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3961
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003962Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003963-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003964
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003965- Added three operators to the operator module:
3966 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3967 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3968 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3969
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003970- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3971
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003972- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3973 archives.
3974
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003975- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3976 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3977 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3978
3979 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3980
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003981- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3982 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3983 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003984 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003985
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003986- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3987 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3988 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3989 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003990 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3991 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3992 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3993 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003994
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003995- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3996 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003997
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003998- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3999
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00004000- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
4001 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
4002
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00004003- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
4004 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
4005 supported.
4006
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00004007- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
4008
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00004009- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
4010 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00004011
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00004012- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
4013 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
4014
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00004015- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
4016
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00004017- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
4018 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
4019
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00004020- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
4021 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
4022 functions but callable type objects.
4023
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004024- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00004025 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004026 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00004027
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00004028- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
4029 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00004030
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00004031- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
4032 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00004033
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00004034- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
4035 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
4036 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
4037 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
4038
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00004039- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
4040 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00004041
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00004042- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
4043 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
4044 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
4045 and __imul__.
4046
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00004047- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00004048 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
4049 is called.
4050
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00004051- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
4052 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
4053 interpreter was compiled.
4054
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00004055- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
4056 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
4057 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004058 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00004059 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
4060 1, not 2.
4061
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00004062- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
4063 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
4064 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
4065 limit.
4066
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00004067- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
4068 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
4069 bug #623464.
4070
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00004071- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
4072 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
4073 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
4074 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
4075
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004076Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004077-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004078
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00004079- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
4080
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00004081- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
4082 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
4083 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
4084 with Python 2.3a2.
4085
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00004086- os.path exposes getctime.
4087
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004088- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004089 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004090 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004091 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004092 unit tests of floating point results.
4093
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00004094- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
4095 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
4096 has been increased.
4097
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00004098- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
4099 executed.
4100
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00004101- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
4102 postinstallation script.
4103
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00004104- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
4105 test the current module.
4106
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004107- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00004108 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
4109 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
4110 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
4111 this behavior needs to be controlled.
4112
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00004113- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00004114 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00004115 Ward's Optik package.
4116
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00004117- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
4118 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
4119 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
4120 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
4121
4122- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
4123 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00004124 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00004125
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00004126- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
4127 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
4128 shelf are binary pickles.
4129
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00004130- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
4131 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
4132
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00004133- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
4134 modules are iterators now.
4135
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00004136- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
4137 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
4138 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
4139 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
4140 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
4141 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004142
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00004143- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
4144 with their entity value.
4145
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00004146- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
4147
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004148- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
4149 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00004150
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004151- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
4152 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004153 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00004154
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00004155- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
4156 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
4157 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
4158 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
4159 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
4160 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
4161 main():
4162
4163 import locale
4164 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
4165
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00004166- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
4167 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
4168
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00004169- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
4170 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
4171 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
4172 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
4173 to the new standard.
4174
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00004175- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
4176 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
4177 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
4178 an extension to the database.
4179
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004180- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
4181 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
4182 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
4183 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00004184 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004185
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004186- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00004187 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004188
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00004189- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
4190 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
4191 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
4192 bounded integers.
4193
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00004194- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
4195 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
4196 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
4197 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
4198 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
4199 in existence.
4200
4201 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
4202 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
4203 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
4204 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
4205 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
4206 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
4207
4208 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
4209 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
4210 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
4211 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
4212
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00004213- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
4214 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
4215 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
4216
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00004217- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
4218
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004219- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
4220 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
4221 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
4222 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
4223
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00004224- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
4225 argument.
4226
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00004227- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
4228 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
4229 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
4230 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
4231 [SF patch 560794].
4232
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004233- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
4234 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
4235 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00004236 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
4237 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
4238 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004239
4240- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
4241 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00004242
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00004243- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
4244 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
4245 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
4246 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00004247
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00004248- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
4249 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
4250 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
4251 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
4252 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
4253
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004254- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00004255
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00004256- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
4257
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00004258- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
4259 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
4260 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
4261 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
4262 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
4263 identical to None.
4264
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00004265- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
4266 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
4267 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
4268 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
4269 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
4270 results now.
4271
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00004272- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
4273 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
4274
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004275- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
4276 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
4277 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
4278 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
4279 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
4280 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
4281 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
4282 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
4283
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00004284- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
4285
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00004286- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
4287 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
4288
4289- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
4290 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
4291 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
4292 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
4293 and other systems.
4294
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004295- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
4296 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
4297 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
4298 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 +00004299 work well with these.
4300
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00004301- compileall now supports quiet operation.
4302
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004303- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00004304 connections.
4305
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00004306- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
4307 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
4308 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
4309
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00004310- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
4311 sets
4312
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00004313- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
4314 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
4315 name.
4316
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00004317- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
4318 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
4319 passed in.
4320
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004321- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00004322 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00004323 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
4324 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00004325
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00004326- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
4327
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00004328- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
4329
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00004330- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
4331 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
4332 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
4333
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004334- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
4335 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
4336 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
4337 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00004338 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004339
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004340- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004341 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004342 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004343
4344- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
4345 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
4346 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
4347
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004348- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00004349 the value of its expression argument.
4350
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004351- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
4352 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
4353 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
4354
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00004355- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
4356 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
4357 skipstone browser was included.
4358
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00004359- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
4360 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
4361
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004362Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004363-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004364
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00004365- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
4366 names in addition to accepting file names.
4367
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00004368- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
4369 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4370 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4371 still used and useful.)
4372
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004373- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4374 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4375 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4376 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004377
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004378- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4379 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4380 the generated binary.
4381
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004382Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004383-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004384
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004385- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4386
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004387- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4388 except in the hands of experts.
4389
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004390- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004391 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4392 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4393 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004394
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004395- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4396 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4397 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4398 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4399 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4400 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4401 builds.
4402
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004403- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4404 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4405 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4406 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4407 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4408 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4409 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4410 new type.
4411
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004412- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004413
4414 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4415 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4416 positive infinities.
4417
4418 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4419 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4420 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4421 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4422 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4423 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4424 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4425
4426 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4427
4428 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4429
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004430- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4431 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4432 size of the executable.
4433
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004434- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4435 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4436 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4437 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004438
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004439- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4440
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004441- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4442 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4443 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004444
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004445- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4446 well as Unix.
4447
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004448- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4449 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4450 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4451 modules in the README file for details.
4452
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004453C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004454-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004455
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004456- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4457 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004458 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004459 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004460 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004461
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004462- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4463 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4464 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4465 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4466 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4467 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004468 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004469 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4470 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4471 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4472 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4473 aligned.)
4474
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004475- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4476 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4477 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4478
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004479- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4480 level.
4481
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004482- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4483 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4484 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4485 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4486 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4487
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004488- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4489 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4490 code.
4491
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004492- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4493 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4494 adjusting for negative indices.
4495
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004496- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4497 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4498 object.
4499
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004500- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4501 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4502 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4503
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004504- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4505 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004506
4507- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4508
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004509- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4510 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4511 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4512 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4513
4514- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4515
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004516- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004517
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004518- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004519 without going through the buffer API.
4520
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004521- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004522
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004523- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4524 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4525 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4526 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4527
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004528- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4529 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4530
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004531- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004532 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4533
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004534New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004535-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004536
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004537- OpenVMS is now supported.
4538
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004539- AtheOS is now supported.
4540
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004541- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4542
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004543- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4544
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004545Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004546-----
4547
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004548- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4549 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4550 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004551
4552Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004553-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004554
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004555- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4556 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4557 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4558 bugs.
4559 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004560 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004561 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4562 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004563 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004564
4565- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004566 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004567
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004568- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4569 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4570
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004571- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4572 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004573 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004574 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4575
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004576- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4577 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4578 use files" uninstall option).
4579
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004580- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4581
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004582- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4583 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4584
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004585- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4586 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4587 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4588
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004589- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4590 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4591 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4592 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4593 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004594 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4595 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4596 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004597
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004598- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004599 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004600 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4601 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4602 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4603 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4604 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4605 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4606 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4607 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4608 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4609 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4610 work around.
4611
4612- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4613 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4614 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4615 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4616 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4617 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4618 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4619 specified with O_CREAT too).
4620
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004621Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004622----
4623
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004624- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004625
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004626- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4627 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4628 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4629
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004630- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4631 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4632 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4633
4634- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4635 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4636 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4637 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4638 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4639 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4640 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4641 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004642
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004643- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4644 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4645 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004646
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004647- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4648 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4649 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4650 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4651 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004652
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004653- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4654 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4655 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004656
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004657- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4658 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004659
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004660- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4661 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4662 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4663 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4664 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004665
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004666- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4667 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4668 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4669
4670- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4671 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4672 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004673
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004674- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4675 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4676 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4677 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004678 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004679
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004680- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4681 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004682
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004683- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4684 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004685
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004686- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004687 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004688 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4689 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004690
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004691
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004692What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004693===============================
4694
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004695*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4696
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004697Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004698--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004699
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004700- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4701 with a custom metaclass.
4702
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004703Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004704-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004705
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004706- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4707 are proxies.
4708
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004709Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004710-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004711
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004712- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4713 very short strings.
4714
4715- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4716 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4717 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4718 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4719 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4720
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004721Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004722-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004723
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004724- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4725 close or delete time).
4726
4727- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4728 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4729
4730- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4731
4732- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004733 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004734
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004735Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004736-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004737
4738Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004739-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004740
4741C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004742-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004743
4744New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004745-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004746
4747Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004748-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004749
4750Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004751-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004752
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004753- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4754
4755- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4756 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4757
4758- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4759 deleted at process exit time.
4760
4761- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4762 in backslash.
4763
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004764Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004765----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004766
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004767- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4768 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4769 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4770
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004771
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004772What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004773===========================
4774
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004775*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4776
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004777Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004778--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004779
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004780- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4781 been extensively updated. See
4782
4783 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4784
4785 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4786
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004787- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4788 deleted!
4789
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004790- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4791 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4792 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4793 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4794 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4795
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004796- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4797
4798 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4799 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4800
4801 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4802 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4803 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4804 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4805 supported anyway.
4806
4807 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4808 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4809
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004810- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4811 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4812 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4813 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4814 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004815
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004816- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4817 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4818 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4819
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004820Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004821-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004822
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004823- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4824 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4825 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4826 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4827 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4828 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004829 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4830 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4831 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4832 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004833
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004834- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4835 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4836 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4837
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004838Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004839-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004840
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004841- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4842
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004843Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004844-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004845
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004846- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4847 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4848 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4849 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4850 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4851 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4852
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004853- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4854
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004855- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4856
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004857- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4858
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004859- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4860 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4861 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4862
4863- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4864
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004865Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004866-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004867
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004868- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4869 off a search on Google.
4870
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004871Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004872-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004873
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004874- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4875 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4876 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4877 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4878 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4879 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4880 other platforms should do likewise.
4881
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004882- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4883 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4884 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4885
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004886C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004887-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004888
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004889- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4890 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4891 producing key-value pairs.
4892
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004893- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004894 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004895 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4896 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4897 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4898 previously went unchallenged.
4899
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004900New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004901-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004902
4903Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004904-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004905
4906Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004907-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004908
4909Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004910----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004911
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004912- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4913 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004914
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004915- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4916 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4917 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4918 home.
4919
4920
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004921What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004922===========================
4923
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004924*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4925
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004926Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004927--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004928
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004929- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4930 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004931
4932 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004933 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004934
4935 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4936 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004937 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004938 This needs to be documented.
4939
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004940- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4941 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4942
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004943- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4944 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4945 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4946
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004947- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4948 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4949
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004950- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4951 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4952 class forbids it).
4953
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004954- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4955 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4956 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4957
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004958- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4959
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004960Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004961-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004962
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004963- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4964 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004965 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004966
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004967- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4968 (like 1 + '').
4969
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004970Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004971-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004972
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004973- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4974 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4975 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4976 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004977 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004978 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4979
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004980- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4981 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4982 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4983 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4984
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004985- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4986 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004987 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4988 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4989 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004990
4991- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4992 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004993
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004994- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4995 bytes on its input.
4996
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004997Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004998-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004999
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00005000- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00005001 convenience function.
5002
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00005003- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
5004 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
5005 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005006 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
5007 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
5008 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
5009 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
5010 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
5011 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00005012
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00005013- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
5014 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
5015 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
5016 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
5017
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00005018- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
5019 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
5020 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
5021
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00005022- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
5023 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
5024 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
5025 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
5026
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005027- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
5028 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005029 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005030 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
5031 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
5032 new -l and -e options.
5033
5034- statcache is now deprecated.
5035
5036- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
5037 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005038 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005039 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
5040 time properly taken into account.
5041
5042- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
5043 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
5044 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
5045 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
5046
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005047Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005048-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005049
5050Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005051-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005052
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005053- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
5054 is built with libdb3 if available.
5055
5056- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
5057
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005058C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005059-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005060
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00005061- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
5062 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
5063 PySequence_Size().
5064
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005065- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
5066
5067- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
5068 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
5069 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
5070
5071- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
5072 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
5073
5074- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
5075 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
5076
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005077New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005078-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005079
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00005080- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
5081 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
5082
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00005083- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
5084 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
5085
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00005086- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
5087
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005088Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005089-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005090
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00005091- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
5092 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
5093
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005094Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005095-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005096
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005097Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005098----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005099
5100- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
5101 removed completely in the next release.
5102
5103- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
5104 OSX.
5105
5106- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
5107 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
5108
5109- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
5110
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005111
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005112What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005113===========================
5114
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005115*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
5116
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005117Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005118--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005119
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005120- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005121 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005122 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005123 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
5124 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005125 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
5126 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005127 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
5128 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00005129
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00005130- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
5131 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
5132
5133- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
5134 class methods, static methods, and properties.
5135
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005136Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005137-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005138
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00005139- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
5140 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
5141 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
5142 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
5143 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
5144 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
5145 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
5146 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
5147
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005148- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
5149 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
5150 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
5151 example).
5152
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005153- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005154 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005155 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005156 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005157
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005158- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
5159 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
5160 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00005161 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005162
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005163- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
5164 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
5165 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
5166 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
5167 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
5168 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
5169
5170 isinstance(x, (A, B))
5171
5172 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
5173
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005174Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005175-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005176
5177- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
5178
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005179- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
5180
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005181- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
5182 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00005183
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005184- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
5185 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
5186 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
5187 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
5188 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
5189 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00005190 attributes.
5191
5192- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
5193 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
5194 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00005195
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005196- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
5197 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
5198 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005199
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005200- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
5201 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
5202 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005203 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
5204 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
5205
5206- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
5207 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005208
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005209Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005210-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005211
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00005212- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
5213 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
5214
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005215- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
5216 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
5217 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
5218 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
5219
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00005220- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
5221 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
5222 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
5223 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
5224
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00005225 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
5226 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
5227 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
5228 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
5229 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
5230 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
5231 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
5232 without losing information).
5233
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005234- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005235 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
5236 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
5237 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
5238 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
5239 module).
5240
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00005241 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005242 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
5243 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
5244 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
5245 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005246
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005247- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00005248 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
5249 encoding.
5250
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00005251- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
5252 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
5253
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005254- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005255 to allow saving the message body to a file.
5256
5257- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
5258 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
5259 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
5260 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
5261
5262- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
5263
5264- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
5265 ON, and OFF.
5266
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005267- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
5268 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
5269
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005270Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005271-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005272
5273- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
5274 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
5275 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005276
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005277- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
5278 been added: -X and -E.
5279
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005280Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005281-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005282
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005283- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
5284 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
5285
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005286C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005287-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005288
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00005289- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
5290 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
5291 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
5292 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
5293 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
5294
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00005295- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
5296 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
5297 as long) arguments.
5298
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005299- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
5300 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
5301 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
5302 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
5303 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
5304 report any bugs or strange behavior).
5305
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005306- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
5307 input.
5308
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005309New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005310-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005311
5312Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005313-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005314
5315Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005316-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005317
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00005318- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
5319 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
5320 is created for .py and .pyw files.
5321
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005322- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
5323 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
5324 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005325 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005326
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005327 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
5328 # (SIGINT) behavior.
5329 import signal
5330 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005331
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005332 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005333 while 1:
5334 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005335 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005336 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
5337 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
5338 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
5339 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005340
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005341
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005342What's New in Python 2.2a4?
5343===========================
5344
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005345*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
5346
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005347Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005348--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005349
5350- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
5351 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
5352 documentation for all operations on list objects.
5353
5354- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
5355 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
5356 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
5357 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
5358 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
5359 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
5360 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005361
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005362- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005363 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005364 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
5365 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
5366 associate a docstring with a property.
5367
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005368- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
5369 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5370 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5371 other built-in object types.
5372
5373- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5374 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5375 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5376 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5377 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5378
5379- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5380 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5381
5382- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5383 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005384 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005385 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5386 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5387 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5388 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5389 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5390
5391- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5392 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5393 class.
5394
5395- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5396 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5397 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5398 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5399
5400- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5401 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5402 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5403 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5404
5405- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5406 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5407
5408- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5409 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5410 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5411 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5412 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005413 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005414 with the same value as s.
5415
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005416- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5417
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005418Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005419----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005420
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005421- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5422
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005423- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5424 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5425 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5426 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5427 objects.
5428
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005429- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5430 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005431 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5432 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5433
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005434- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5435 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5436 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5437
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005438Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005439-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005440
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005441- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5442 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5443 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5444 by the instances.
5445
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005446- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5447 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5448 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5449
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005450- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5451 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5452 before the entire comparison is complete.
5453
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005454- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5455 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5456 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5457
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005458- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5459 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5460 getwriter().
5461
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005462- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5463 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5464
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005465- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005466 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5467 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5468
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005469- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5470 iterable object.
5471
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005472- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5473 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005474
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005475- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5476 authentication.
5477
5478- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5479 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005480
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005481- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005482 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5483 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5484 a sample driver.)
5485
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005486Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005487-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005488
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005489- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5490 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5491 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5492 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5493 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5494 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5495 kernel has large file support.
5496
5497- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5498 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5499 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5500 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5501 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5502
5503- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5504 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5505 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5506
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005507C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005508-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005509
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005510- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5511 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5512
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005513New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005514-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005515
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005516- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5517 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5518
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005519Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005520-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005521
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005522- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5523 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5524 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5525 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5526 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5527
5528- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5529 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5530 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5531 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5532
5533- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5534 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5535
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005536Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005537-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005538
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005539- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005540 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5541 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005542
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005543
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005544What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5545===========================
5546
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005547*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5548
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005549Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005550----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005551
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005552- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5553 big to represent as a C double.
5554
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005555- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5556 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5557 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5558 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5559 restriction).
5560
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005561- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5562 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5563 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5564 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5565 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5566
5567 >>> dir([])
5568 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5569 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5570 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5571 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5572 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5573 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5574 'reverse', 'sort']
5575
5576 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5577
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005578- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005579 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5580 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5581 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5582 OverflowError exception.
5583
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005584- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005585 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005586 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5587 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5588 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5589 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5590 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005591 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005592 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5593 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5594
5595 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5596 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5597 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5598 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005599
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005600- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005601 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5602 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5603 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5604 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5605 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5606 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5607 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5608 once it is created.
5609
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005610- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5611 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5612 (key, value) pairs.
5613
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005614- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005615 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5616 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5617
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005618- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5619 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5620 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5621 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5622 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005623
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005624- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005625 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5626 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5627
5628 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5629
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005630- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005631 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5632
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005633Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005634-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005635
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005636- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005637 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5638 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005639
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005640- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5641 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5642 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5643 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5644 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5645 in this area anymore).
5646
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005647- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5648 threading.Timer.
5649
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005650- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5651 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5652
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005653- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005654 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5655
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005656- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005657 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5658 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5659 converted to Python longs.
5660
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005661- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005662 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5663
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005664- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5665 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5666 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5667
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005668Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005669-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005670
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005671- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5672 division operators as per PEP 238.
5673
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005674Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005675-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005676
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005677- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5678 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5679 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5680 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5681
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005682C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005683-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005684
5685- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005686
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005687- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5688 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005689 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005690
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005691 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5692 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005693 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005694 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005695
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005696- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005697 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5698 module:
5699
5700 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005701
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005702 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5703 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005704
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005705 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5706 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005707
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005708 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5709
5710 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5711
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005712- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005713 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5714 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5715 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005716
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005717New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005718-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005719
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005720- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5721 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5722 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5723 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5724 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005725
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005726Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005727-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005728
5729Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005730-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005731
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005732- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5733 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5734 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5735 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005736 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5737 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5738 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5739 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5740 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005741
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005742- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005743 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5744
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005745
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005746What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5747===========================
5748
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005749*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5750
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005751Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005752-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005753
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005754- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5755 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5756
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005757- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5758 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5759 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005760
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005761- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5762 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5763 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5764 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005765
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005766- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5767
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005768- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005769
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005770Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005771-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005772
5773- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005774 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005775 the module docstring for details.
5776
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005777Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005778-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005779
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005780- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005781 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5782 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5783 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005784
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005785- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5786 Nick Mathewson.
5787
5788Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005789----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005790
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005791- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5792 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5793 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5794 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5795 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5796 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5797 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5798 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5799
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005800- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5801 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5802 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5803 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5804
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005805- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5806 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5807 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5808 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5809 come a long way).
5810
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005811- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5812 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5813 write filters for these warnings).
5814
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005815- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5816 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5817 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5818 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5819 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5820
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005821- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5822 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5823 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5824 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5825 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5826 older distribution.
5827
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005828Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005829-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005830
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005831- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5832 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005833 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005834
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005835- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5836 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5837 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5838
5839- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5840
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005841- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5842
5843- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5844
5845- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5846
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005847- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005848
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005849- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5850
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005851New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005852-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005853
5854C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005855-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005856
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005857- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5858 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5859 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5860 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5861 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5862 against buffer overruns.
5863
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005864- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005865 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5866 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005867 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5868 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5869 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5870
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005871- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5872 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5873 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5874 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5875 deprecated.
5876
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005877Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005878-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005879
5880- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5881 relevant is found.
5882
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005883
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005884What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005885===========================
5886
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005887*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5888
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005889Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005890----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005891
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005892- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5893 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5894 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5895 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5896 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5897 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5898 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5899 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005900 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005901 repaired.
5902
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005903- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005904 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005905 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5906 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5907 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5908 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5909 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5910 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5911 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5912 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5913
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005914- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5915 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5916 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5917 leading BMO character).
5918
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005919- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5920 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5921 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5922
5923 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5924 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5925 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005926
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005927 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5928 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5929 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5930 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5931 for various simple to use conversions.
5932
5933 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5934 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5935
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005936 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5937 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5938 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5939 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5940 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5941 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5942 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5943 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5944 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5945 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5946 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5947 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5948 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5949 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5950 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005951
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005952- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5953 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5954 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005955 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005956 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005957
5958 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005959 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5960 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5961 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5962 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5963 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005964 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5965 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005966
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005967 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5968 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5969 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005970 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005971
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005972- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5973 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5974 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5975 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5976 floating arithmetic,
5977
5978 x = 9007199254740992.0
5979 print long(x)
5980
5981 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5982 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5983 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5984 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5985 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5986 functions are of good quality).
5987
5988 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5989 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5990 algorithms to break.
5991
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005992- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5993 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5994 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5995 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5996 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5997 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5998 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5999 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
6000 order.
6001
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00006002- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
6003 operation along the most common code paths.
6004
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00006005- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
6006 the same as dict.has_key(x).
6007
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00006008- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
6009 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
6010 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
6011 {}.update(UserDict())
6012
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00006013- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
6014 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
6015 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
6016 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
6017 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
6018 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
6019 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
6020 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
6021
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00006022- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00006023 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006024
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00006025 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00006026 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
6027 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00006028 join() method of strings
6029 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00006030 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
6031 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006032 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00006033 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00006034
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00006035- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
6036 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
6037
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00006038- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
6039 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
6040
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00006041- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
6042 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
6043 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
6044 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
6045
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00006046- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
6047 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00006048 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00006049 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
6050 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00006051
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00006052- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
6053
6054
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006055Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006056-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006057
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00006058- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006059 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00006060 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
6061 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
6062
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00006063- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
6064 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
6065
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00006066- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
6067 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
6068 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
6069 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
6070
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00006071- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
6072 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
6073 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
6074
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00006075- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
6076
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00006077- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
6078
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00006079- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
6080 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
6081 that are still imported into string.py).
6082
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006083- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
6084
6085- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
6086 Now it does.
6087
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00006088- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
6089
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00006090- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
6091 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
6092 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
6093 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
6094 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00006095 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
6096 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00006097
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00006098- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
6099 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
6100 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
6101 'help(object)'.
6102
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006103Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006104-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006105
6106- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006107 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006108 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
6109 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
6110
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006111- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00006112 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
6113 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006114
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00006115C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006116-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00006117
6118- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
6119 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006120
6121----
6122
6123**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**