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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2004*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +000015- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
16 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
17
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +000018- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000019 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +000020
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000021- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000022 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000023 which was missing for no apparent reason.
24
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000025- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000026 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
27 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
28
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +000029- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
30 types that support garbage collection.
31
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +000032- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
33
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +000034- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
35 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
36 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
37 Jython.
38
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +000039- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
40
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000041Extension modules
42-----------------
43
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +000044- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
45
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000046Library
47-------
48
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +000049- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
50
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +000051- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
52 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
53 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
54
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +000055- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
56
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +000057- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
58 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
59
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +000060- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
61 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
62 when dummy_threading is being used.
63
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +000064- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
65 from a tarfile.
66
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +000067- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +000068 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +000069
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +000070- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
71 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
72 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
73 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
74
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +000075- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
76 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
77
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +000078- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
79 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
80 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
81 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
82 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
83 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
84 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
85 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
86 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
87 by some other method in progress).
88
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000089- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
90 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
91 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +000092
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +000093- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
94
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +000095- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
96 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
97 AM Kuchling.
98
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +000099- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
100 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
101 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
102
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000103- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
104 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
105 instead of unsigned.
106
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000107- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000108 no longer part of the public API.
109
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000110- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
111 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
112 string methods of the same name).
113
Andrew M. Kuchling64ed2982004-07-10 18:43:32 +0000114- asyncore's dispatcher.set_reuse_addr() now works correctly on Windows.
115 SF patch 982681.
116
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000117- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000118 SF patch 945642.
119
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000120- doctest unittest integration improvements:
121
122 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
123
124 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
125 DocTestSuites.
126
127- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
128 that provide thread-local data.
129
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000130- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
131 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
132
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000133- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
134
135- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
136 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
137 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
138
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000139- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
140
141 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
142 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
143 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
144
145 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
146 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
147 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
148 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
149
150 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
151 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
152
153 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
154 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
155 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
156 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
157
158 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
159 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
160 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
161 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
162 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
163
164 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
165 wrapping help output.
166
167 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
168 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
169 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000170
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000171Tools/Demos
172-----------
173
174Build
175-----
176
177C API
178-----
179
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000180- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
181 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
182
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000183Documentation
184-------------
185
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000186- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000187
188 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
189 assigning thier values
190
191 - correct my missconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
192
193 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
194
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000195- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000196
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000197New platforms
198-------------
199
200Tests
201-----
202
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000203- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000204 platforms that use the Makefile.
205
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000206- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
207 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
208 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
209
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000210Windows
211-------
212
213Mac
214---
215
216
217
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000218What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
219=================================
220
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000221*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000222
223Core and builtins
224-----------------
225
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000226- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
227 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
228 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
229 objects now (one object instead of three).
230
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000231- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
232 Windows DLLs.
233
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000234- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval() now accepts any mapping type.
235
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000236- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
237 a new .pyc magic.
238
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000239- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
240 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
241 be there.
242
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000243- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
244 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
245 the LC_NUMERIC category.
246
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000247- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
248 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
249 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
250
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000251- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
252
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000253- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
254 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
255 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000256
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000257- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
258 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
259
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000260- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
261
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000262- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000263 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000264
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000265- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
266
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000267- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
268
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000269- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
270 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
271
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000272- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
273 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
274 Fixes bug #858016 .
275
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000276- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
277 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
278 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
279
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000280- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
281 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
282 improves their performance (about 35%).
283
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000284- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
285 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
286 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
287
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000288- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
289 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
290 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
291 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
292
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000293- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
294 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
295 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
296 length is not known).
297
298- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
299 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000300 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
301 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000302 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
303
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000304- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
305 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
306
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000307- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
308 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
309 keyword arguments.
310
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000311- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
312 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
313 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
314
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000315- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
316 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
317 cases.
318
319- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
320 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
321 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
322 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
323 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
324 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
325 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
326 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
327 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
328 a release build.
329
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000330- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
331 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
332
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000333- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000334 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000335
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000336- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
337 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
338 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
339 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
340 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
341 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
342 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
343 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
344 destroyed.
345
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000346- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
347 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
348 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
349 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
350 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
351 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
352 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
353 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
354
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000355- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
356 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
357 character other than a space.
358
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000359- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
360 by the function object or by the method object, the function
361 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
362 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
363 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
364 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
365 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
366 attributes with the same name.
367
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000368- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
369 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
370 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
371 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
372 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
373 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
374 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
375 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
376 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
377 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
378 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
379 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
380 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
381 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000382
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000383- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
384 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
385 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
386 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
387 This has been repaired.
388
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000389- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
390
391- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
392
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000393- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
394 over a sequence.
395
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000396- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000397 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000398
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000399- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
400
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000401- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
402 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
403 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
404 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
405 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
406 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
407 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
408 records with equal keys is unchanged).
409
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000410- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
411 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
412 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
413
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000414- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
415 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
416 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
417 freelist.
418
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000419- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
420 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
421
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000422- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
423 number.
424
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000425- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
426 a TypeError exception.
427
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000428- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
429 820195.
430
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000431- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
432 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
433 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
434
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000435- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000436 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
437 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000438
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000439- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
440 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
441 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
442
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000443- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
444 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000445 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000446
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000447- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000448 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
449 the first call.
450
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000451
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000452Extension modules
453-----------------
454
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000455- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
456 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
457
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000458- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
459 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
460 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
461 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
462 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
463 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
464 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000465
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000466- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
467
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000468- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
469
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000470- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
471 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
472
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000473- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
474 fewer false positives.
475
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000476- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
477 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
478
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000479- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000480 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
481
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000482- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000483 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000484 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
485 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
486 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000487
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000488- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
489 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
490 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
491 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
492
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000493- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
494 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
495 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
496 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
497 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
498 #897625.
499
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000500- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
501 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
502
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000503- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
504 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
505 and pops on either side of the deque.
506
507- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
508 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
509
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000510- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
511 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
512 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
513 other functions that expect a function argument.
514
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000515- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
516
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000517- os.getsid was added.
518
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000519- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
520 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
521 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
522
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000523- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
524
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000525- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
526
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000527- readline.clear_history was added.
528
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000529- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
530
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000531- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
532
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000533- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
534
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000535- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
536
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000537- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
538
539- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
540
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000541- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
542
543- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
544
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000545- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
546 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
547 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
548
549- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
550 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
551 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
552 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
553 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
554 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
555 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
556
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000557- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
558 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
559 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
560 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000561
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000562- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000563 iterators from a single iterable.
564
565- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
566 of raising a TypeError exception.
567
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000568- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
569 as parameter.
570
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000571Library
572-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000573
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +0000574- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
575 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
576 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000577
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +0000578- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
579 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
580 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +0000581
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +0000582- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +0000583
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +0000584- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
585 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +0000586
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +0000587- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
588 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
589
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000590- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
591
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000592- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000593 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000594
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000595- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
596 that generate a *-debuginfo.rpm.
597
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +0000598- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
599
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +0000600- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
601 on cygwin and mingw32.
602
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +0000603- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
604
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +0000605- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
606 module.
607
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +0000608- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
609 installation scheme for all platforms.
610
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000611- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +0000612 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000613
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000614- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
615 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
616 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
617
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000618- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
619 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
620 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
621
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000622- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
623
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000624- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
625
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000626- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
627 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
628
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000629- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
630 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
631 type pattern with the same value exists.
632
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000633- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
634 when run from the command prompt).
635
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000636- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
637 not taken into consideration when caching value.
638
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000639- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
640 default sort).
641
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000642- Added global runctx function to profile module
643
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000644- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
645
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000646- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
647
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000648- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
649
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000650- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000651 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
652 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
653 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
654 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
655 accordingly.
656
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000657- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
658 decoding standards.
659
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000660- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
661 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
662 called for all requests.
663
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000664- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
665 they are passed to the compiler.
666
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000667- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
668 indent, width and depth.
669
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000670- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
671 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
672
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000673- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
674 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
675
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000676- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
677
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000678- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
679
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000680- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
681
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000682- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
683 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
684
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000685- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +0000686 for better performance.
687
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000688- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000689
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000690- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
691 a string).
692
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000693- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
694
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000695- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
696
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000697- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
698
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000699- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
700
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000701- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
702 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
703 list of fieldnames.
704
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000705- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
706 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
707
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000708- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
709
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000710- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
711 empty lists.
712
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000713- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
714 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
715 and shelves.
716
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000717- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
718 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
719
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000720- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000721 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
722 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000723
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000724- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
725 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000726 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000727
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000728- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000729 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
730 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
731
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000732- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
733 and removed in Py2.4.
734
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000735- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
736
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000737- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
738
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000739Tools/Demos
740-----------
741
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000742- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
743 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
744
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000745- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
746
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000747- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
748 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
749 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
750 destination in situations where both files are given.
751
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000752- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
753 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
754 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
755 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
756
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000757- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
758
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000759- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
760 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
761 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
762 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
763 now.
764
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000765- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
766 in effect
767
768- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
769 C-c C-h
770
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000771- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
772 -d option was given.
773
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000774Build
775-----
776
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +0000777- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
778 build under OS X.
779
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +0000780- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
781 --enable-profiling.
782
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +0000783- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
784 is configured --with-tsc.
785
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +0000786- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
787 on AMD64.
788
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +0000789- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
790 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
791
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000792- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
793 removed.
794
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000795- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
796 supported (see PEP 11).
797
798- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
799
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000800- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
801
802- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
803 (see PEP 11).
804
805- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
806 sizeof(char) must be 1.
807
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000808C API
809-----
810
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +0000811- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
812 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
813 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
814
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000815- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
816 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
817 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
818 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
819
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +0000820- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
821 generator objects.
822
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000823- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
824 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +0000825 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
826 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000827
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +0000828- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
829 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
830
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +0000831- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
832 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
833 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
834 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
835 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
836
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000837- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
838 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
839 about 10% faster.
840
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000841- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
842 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
843
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000844- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
845 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
846 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
847 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
848
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000849Windows
850-------
851
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000852- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
853 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
854 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
855 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
856
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000857- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
858 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
859 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
860
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000861
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000862What's New in Python 2.3 final?
863===============================
864
865*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
866
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000867IDLE
868----
869
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000870- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
871 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
872 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
873 context-menu actions.
874
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000875- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
876 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
877 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
878 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
879 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
880 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
881 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
882 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
883 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
884
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000885
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000886What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
887=============================================
888
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000889*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000890
891Core and builtins
892-----------------
893
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000894- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000895 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000896 comment at the end are still unsupported.
897
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000898Extension modules
899-----------------
900
901- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
902 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
903 than once. This has been fixed.
904
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000905- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
906 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
907 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
908 call.
909
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000910- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
911
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000912Library
913-------
914
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000915- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
916 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
917
918- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
919 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
920 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
921 restored.
922
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000923IDLE
924----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000925
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000926- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000927
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000928Build
929-----
930
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000931- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
932 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
933
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000934C API
935-----
936
937Windows
938-------
939
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000940- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
941 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
942
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000943- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
944
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000945Mac
946---
947
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000948- Various fixes to pimp.
949
950- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
951
952- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
953 more problems than it solves.
954
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000955
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000956What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
957=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000958
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000959*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
960
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000961Core and builtins
962-----------------
963
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000964- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
965 by sys.setcheckinterval().
966
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000967- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
968 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000969 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000970
971- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
972 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
973 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000974 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000975
976- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
977 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000978
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000979- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
980 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
981 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
982
983- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000984 770247.
985
986- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000987
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000988Extension modules
989-----------------
990
991- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
992 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
993
994- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
995
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000996- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
997
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000998- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
999 contained within the _strptime module.
1000
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001001- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1002 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1003
1004- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001005 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1006
1007- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1008 the find_class attribute, if present.
1009
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001010- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001011
1012 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1013 (SF bug 763298).
1014
1015 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001016 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1017 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1018 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001019
1020 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1021
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001022Library
1023-------
1024
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001025- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1026
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001027- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1028 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1029 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1030 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1031 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1032 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1033 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1034 or Tester().
1035
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001036- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1037 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1038 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1039 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1040 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1041 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1042 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1043 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1044 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001045
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001046 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001047
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001048- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1049 weren't before was an oversight.
1050
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001051- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1052 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1053
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001054- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1055 when there are no lines.
1056
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001057- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1058 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1059
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001060- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1061 to child processes.
1062
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001063- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1064
1065- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1066
1067- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1068 xmlrpclib.
1069
1070- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1071 responses.
1072
1073- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1074 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1075
1076- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1077 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1078 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1079
1080- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1081 used as patterns.
1082
1083- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1084 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1085 than Tk 8.3.
1086
1087- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1088
1089- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001090
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001091Tools/Demos
1092-----------
1093
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001094- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1095
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001096- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1097
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001098- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001099
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001100Build
1101-----
1102
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001103- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1104
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001105- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1106
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001107- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1108 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001109
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001110- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1111 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1112 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001113
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001114C API
1115-----
1116
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001117- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1118 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1119
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001120Windows
1121-------
1122
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001123- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1124 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1125 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1126 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1127 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1128 Python exception ::
1129
1130 thread.error: can't start new thread
1131
1132 is raised now.
1133
1134- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1135 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1136 instead of from DLL teardown.
1137
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001138Mac
1139---
1140
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001141- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001142 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001143 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1144 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1145 the executable in the bundle.
1146
1147- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001148
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001149- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1150
1151- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1152 on Panther.
1153
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001154What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1155================================
1156
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001157*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001158
1159Core and builtins
1160-----------------
1161
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001162- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1163 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1164 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1165 with the -i option.
1166
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001167- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1168 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1169
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001170- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1171 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1172
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001173- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1174 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1175 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1176 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1177 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1178 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1179 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1180 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1181 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1182 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1183 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1184 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1185 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001186
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001187- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1188 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1189 embedded in a lambda expression.
1190
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001191- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1192 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1193 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1194 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1195 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1196
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001197- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1198 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1199 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1200
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001201- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1202 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1203
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001204- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1205 It's writable again.
1206
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001207- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1208 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1209 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001210 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001211
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001212- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1213 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1214 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1215
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001216Extension modules
1217-----------------
1218
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001219- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1220 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1221
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001222- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1223 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1224 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1225 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1226
1227- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1228 collection.
1229
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001230- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1231 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1232 unique within a single program run.
1233
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001234- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1235 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1236
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001237- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1238 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1239
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001240- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1241 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001242
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001243- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1244
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001245- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1246 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1247
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001248- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1249 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1250 for many BSD-derived systems.
1251
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001252
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001253Library
1254-------
1255
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001256- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1257 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1258 primary ones:
1259
1260 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1261 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1262 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1263
1264 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1265 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1266 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1267 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1268 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1269 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1270
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001271- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1272 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1273 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1274 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1275 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1276 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1277 argument.
1278
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001279- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1280 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1281 in the archive.
1282
1283- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1284 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1285
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001286- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1287 569574).
1288
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001289- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1290 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1291 no more.
1292
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001293- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1294 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1295 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1296 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1297 code coverage.
1298
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001299- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1300 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1301 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001302 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1303 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001304
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001305- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1306 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1307 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001308 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001309
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001310- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1311
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001312- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1313 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1314 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1315 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1316
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001317- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1318 handling.
1319
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001320- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1321 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1322
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001323- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1324 in socket.py.
1325
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001326- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1327
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001328- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1329 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1330 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1331 opener with proxy support.
1332
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001333- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1334
1335- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1336
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001337Tools/Demos
1338-----------
1339
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001340- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1341
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001342- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1343
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001344- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1345 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001346
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001347- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1348 files.
1349
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001350Build
1351-----
1352
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001353- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001354 different root directory.
1355
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001356C API
1357-----
1358
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001359- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1360 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1361 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1362 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1363 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1364 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1365 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1366 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1367 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1368 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1369
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001370- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1371 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1372 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1373 from Python.
1374
1375
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001376New platforms
1377-------------
1378
1379None this time.
1380
1381Tests
1382-----
1383
1384- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1385 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1386
1387Windows
1388-------
1389
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001390- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1391
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001392- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1393 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1394 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1395 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1396 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1397 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1398 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1399 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1400 that's what it's for.
1401
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001402Mac
1403---
1404
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001405- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1406 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1407 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1408 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001409- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1410 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1411- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001412
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001413SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1414------------------------------------
1415
1416430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1417598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1418622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1419661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1420683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1421697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1422713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1423724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1424727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1425729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1426730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1427731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1428732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1429733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1430735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1431740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1432744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1433745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1434747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1435749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1436751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1437753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1438755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1439757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1440760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1441
1442
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001443What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1444================================
1445
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001446*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001447
1448Core and builtins
1449-----------------
1450
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001451- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1452 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1453
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001454- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1455 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1456 and cannot be strings).
1457
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001458- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1459 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1460 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1461 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1462
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001463- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1464 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1465 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1466 Python itself.
1467
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001468- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1469 the referenced object, if it has one.
1470
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001471- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1472 the thread started at
1473 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1474
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001475- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1476 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1477 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1478 placed on a list index.
1479
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001480- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1481 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1482 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1483 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1484
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001485- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1486 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1487 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1488 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1489 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1490 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1491 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1492
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001493- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1494 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1495 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1496 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1497 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1498
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001499- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1500 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001501
1502- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1503 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1504 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1505 #693195.)
1506
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001507- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1508 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001509
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001510- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001511 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001512 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1513 interpreter executions, would fail.
1514
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001515- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001516 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001517 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001518
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001519Extension modules
1520-----------------
1521
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001522- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1523 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1524 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1525 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1526
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001527- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1528 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1529
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001530- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1531 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1532 and Greg Chapman.)
1533
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001534- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1535 recursively.
1536
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001537- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001538 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1539 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1540 leaks.
1541
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001542- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1543
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001544- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1545 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1546 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1547 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1548 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1549 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1550 #705836.
1551
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001552- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001553 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1554
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001555- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1556 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1557 See SF bug #692416.
1558
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001559- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1560 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1561
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001562- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1563 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1564 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001565
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001566- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001567 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1568 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1569
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001570- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1571 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1572 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1573 timeouts to work properly.
1574
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001575Library
1576-------
1577
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001578- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1579 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1580 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1581 future release.
1582
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001583- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1584 for querying platform dependent features.
1585
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001586- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001587
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001588- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1589 pickle protocol versions.
1590
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001591- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1592 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1593 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1594
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001595- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1596
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001597- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1598 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1599 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1600 modules.
1601
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001602- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1603 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1604 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1605
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001606- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1607 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1608
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001609- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1610 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1611 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1612
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001613- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001614 MS Office extensions.
1615
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001616- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1617 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1618
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001619- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1620 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1621
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001622- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1623 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1624 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1625 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1626 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1627 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1628
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001629- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1630 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1631 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001632
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001633- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1634 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1635 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1636
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001637- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1638
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001639- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1640 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1641 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1642
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001643Tools/Demos
1644-----------
1645
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001646- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1647 See the module docstring for details.
1648
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001649Build
1650-----
1651
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001652- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1653 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001654
1655C API
1656-----
1657
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001658- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1659
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001660- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1661 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1662 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1663
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001664- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1665 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001666
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001667 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1668 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1669 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001670
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001671- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001672 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1673
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001674- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1675 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1676 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001677
1678New platforms
1679-------------
1680
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001681None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001682
1683Tests
1684-----
1685
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001686- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1687 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001688
1689Windows
1690-------
1691
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001692- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1693 function.
1694
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001695- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1696 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001697
1698Mac
1699---
1700
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001701- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1702 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001703
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001704- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1705 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001706
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001707- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1708 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1709 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001710
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001711- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001712 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1713 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001714
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001715- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1716 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001717
1718
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001719What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1720=================================
1721
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001722*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001723
1724Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001725-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001726
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001727- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1728 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1729 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1730
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001731- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1732 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1733 (SF patch #664376.)
1734
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001735- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1736 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1737 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1738 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1739 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1740 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001741 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001742
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001743- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1744 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1745 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1746 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001747 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001748
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001749- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1750 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1751 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1752 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1753 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1754 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1755 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1756 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1757 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1758 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1759 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1760
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001761- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1762 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1763 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1764 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1765 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1766 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1767
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001768- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1769 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1770
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001771- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1772 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1773 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1774 case.)
1775
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001776- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1777 passed as unicode strings.
1778
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001779- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1780 See SF bug #683467.
1781
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001782- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1783 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1784
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001785- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1786
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001787- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1788
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001789- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1790 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1791 arguments.
1792
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001793- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1794 See SF bug #667147.
1795
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001796- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001797 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001798 See SF bug #676155.
1799
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001800- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001801 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001802 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1803 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1804 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1805 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1806 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1807 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001808
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001809Extension modules
1810-----------------
1811
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001812- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1813 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1814 tp_as_number pointer.
1815
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001816- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1817 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1818 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1819 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1820 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1821
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001822- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1823
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001824- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1825
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001826- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001827 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001828 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1829 patch #678531.)
1830
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001831- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1832 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1833
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001834- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1835 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1836
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001837- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1838
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001839- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1840 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1841 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1842
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001843- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1844
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001845- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1846 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1847
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001848- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001849
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001850- datetime changes:
1851
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001852 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1853
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001854 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1855 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1856 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1857 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1858 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1859 now.
1860
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001861 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001862 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1863 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001864
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001865 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001866 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001867 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1868 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1869 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1870 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001871
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001872 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1873 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1874 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001875 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1876
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001877 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1878 by a later example coded by Guido.
1879
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001880 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001881 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1882 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1883 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001884 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1885 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1886
1887 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1888 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1889 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1890 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1891 tzinfo subclass instance.
1892
1893 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1894 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1895 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1896 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1897 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1898 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1899 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1900 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001901
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001902 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1903 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1904 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1905 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1906 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001907 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1908
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001909 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001910
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001911 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1912 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1913 as a naive datetime object.
1914
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001915 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1916 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1917 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1918
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001919 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1920 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1921 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1922 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1923 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1924 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1925 comparison.
1926
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001927 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1928 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1929 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1930 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001931 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001932
1933 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001934
1935 and ::
1936
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001937 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1938
1939 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1940 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1941 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1942 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1943
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001944 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1945 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1946 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1947 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1948 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1949
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001950 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1951 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001952 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1953 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001954
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001955Library
1956-------
1957
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001958- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1959 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1960
1961- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1962 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1963 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1964 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1965 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1966 See PEP 307 for details.
1967
1968- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1969 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1970
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001971- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1972 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001973 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001974 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1975 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001976 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001977
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001978- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1979 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1980
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001981- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1982 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1983 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1984
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001985- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1986
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001987- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1988 exception.
1989
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001990- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1991 class.
1992
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001993- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1994 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1995 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1996
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001997- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1998 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1999
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002000- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002001 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2002 See SF bug #659228.
2003
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002004- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2005 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2006 See SF patch #651082.
2007
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002008- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002009
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002010- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2011 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2012
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002013- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002014 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002015
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002016- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2017 DOS paths from other platforms.
2018
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002019Tools/Demos
2020-----------
2021
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002022- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2023 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2024 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2025 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2026 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2027 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2028 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2029 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2030 example:
2031
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002032 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2033 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002034
2035 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2036
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002037
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002038Build
2039-----
2040
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002041- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2042 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2043 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002044 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2045
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002046 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2047
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002048- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2049 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2050 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2051 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2052 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2053 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2054 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2055 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2056 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2057
2058- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2059 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2060 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2061 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2062
2063- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2064 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2065
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002066C API
2067-----
2068
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002069- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2070 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002071
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002072- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2073 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2074 tp_as_number pointer.
2075
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002076- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2077 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2078 (SF #681367)
2079
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002080- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2081 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2082 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2083 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002084
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002085Tests
2086-----
2087
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002088- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002089 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2090 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2091 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2092 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2093 pydoc.)
2094
2095- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2096
2097- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002098
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002099Windows
2100-------
2101
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002102- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2103 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2104 time).
2105
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002106- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2107 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2108
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002109- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2110 release without strong cryptography.
2111
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002112- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002113 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002114
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002115- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2116 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2117
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002118Mac
2119---
2120
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002121- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2122 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002123
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002124- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2125 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2126 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002127
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002128- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2129 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002130
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002131- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2132 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2133 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2134 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002135
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002136- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002137 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2138 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2139 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002140
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002141
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002142What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002143=================================
2144
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002145*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002146
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002147Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002148--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002149
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002150- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2151
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002152- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2153 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002154 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002155 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002156 a different meaning than before.
2157
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002158- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002159 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002160 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002161
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002162- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002163 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002164 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002165
2166- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2167 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2168 and deallocation.
2169
2170- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2171 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2172
2173- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2174 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2175 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2176 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2177 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2178
2179- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2180 now detected by the garbage collector.
2181
2182- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2183 [SF bug 519621]
2184
2185- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2186 identifier.
2187
2188- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2189 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2190 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2191 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2192 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2193 [SF bug 563060]
2194
2195- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2196 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2197 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2198 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2199 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2200
2201- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2202 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2203 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2204
2205- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2206
2207- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2208 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2209 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2210 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2211 state of the slots would be lost.)
2212
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002213Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002214-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002215
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002216- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002217 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2218 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2219 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2220 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002221 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2222 Jython 2.1.
2223
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002224- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002225 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002226 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2227 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2228 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2229 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2230 these, see PEP 302.
2231
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002232- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2233 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2234 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2235
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002236- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2237 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2238 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2239
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002240- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2241 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2242 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2243
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002244- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2245 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2246 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2247 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2248 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2249 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2250 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2251 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2252 releases or implementations.
2253
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002254- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002255 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2256 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002257
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002258- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2259 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2260
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002261- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2262 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2263 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2264
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002265- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2266 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2267
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002268- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2269 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002270 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2271 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002272
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002273- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2274 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2275 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2276 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2277 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2278
2279 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2280 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2281 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2282 pattern.
2283
2284 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2285 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2286 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2287 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2288
2289 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2290 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2291 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2292 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2293 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2294 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2295
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002296- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2297 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2298 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2299 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2300 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2301 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2302 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2303 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002304
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002305- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2306 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2307 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2308 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2309 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002310 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2311 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2312 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2313 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2314 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2315 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2316 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002317
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002318- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2319 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2320
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002321- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2322 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2323 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2324 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2325 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2326 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2327 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2328 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2329 to Zack Weinberg!
2330
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002331- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2332 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2333 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2334 type. This has been fixed now.
2335
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002336- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2337 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2338 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2339
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002340- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2341 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2342 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2343 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2344 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2345 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2346 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2347 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002348 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002349
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002350- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2351 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2352 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002353
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002354- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2355 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2356 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2357 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2358 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2359 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2360 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2361 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002362 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002363 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2364 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2365
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002366- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2367 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2368 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2369 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2370 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2371 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2372 this.)
2373
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002374- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2375 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002376 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002377 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002378 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2379 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002380 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2381 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002382
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002383- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2384 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2385 currently running.
2386
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002387- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2388 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2389 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2390 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2391
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002392- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2393 as directory names.
2394
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002395- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2396 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2397
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002398- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2399 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2400
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002401- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002402 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2403 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002404
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002405- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2406 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2407 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2408 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2409 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2410
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002411- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2412 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2413 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2414 removed.
2415
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002416- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2417 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2418 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2419
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002420- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2421 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2422 to __debug__.
2423
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002424- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2425 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2426 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2427
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002428- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2429 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2430 deprecated now.
2431
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002432- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2433 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2434 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002435
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002436- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2437 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2438 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2439 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2440 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002441
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002442- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2443 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2444
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002445- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2446 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2447 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002448 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002449 is backward compatible.
2450
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002451- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2452 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2453 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2454 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2455 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2456
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002457- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2458 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2459 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2460 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2461 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2462 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002463
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002464- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2465 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2466
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002467- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2468 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2469
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002470- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2471 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2472 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2473 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2474 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2475
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002476- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2477 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2478 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2479
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002480- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002481 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2482
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002483- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2484 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2485 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002486
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002487- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2488 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2489
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002490- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2491 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2492 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2493
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002494- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2495
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002496Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002497-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002498
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002499- Added three operators to the operator module:
2500 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2501 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2502 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2503
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002504- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2505
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002506- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2507 archives.
2508
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002509- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2510 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2511 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2512
2513 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2514
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002515- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2516 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2517 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002518 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002519
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002520- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2521 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2522 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2523 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002524 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2525 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2526 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2527 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002528
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002529- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2530 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002531
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002532- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2533
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002534- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2535 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2536
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002537- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2538 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2539 supported.
2540
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002541- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2542
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002543- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2544 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002545
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002546- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2547 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2548
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002549- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2550
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002551- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2552 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2553
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002554- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2555 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2556 functions but callable type objects.
2557
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002558- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002559 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002560 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002561
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002562- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2563 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002564
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002565- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2566 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002567
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002568- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2569 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2570 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2571 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2572
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002573- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2574 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002575
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002576- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2577 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2578 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2579 and __imul__.
2580
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002581- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002582 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2583 is called.
2584
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002585- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2586 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2587 interpreter was compiled.
2588
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002589- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2590 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2591 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002592 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002593 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2594 1, not 2.
2595
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002596- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2597 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2598 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2599 limit.
2600
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002601- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2602 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2603 bug #623464.
2604
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002605- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2606 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2607 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2608 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2609
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002610Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002611-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002612
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002613- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2614
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002615- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2616 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2617 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2618 with Python 2.3a2.
2619
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002620- os.path exposes getctime.
2621
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002622- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002623 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002624 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002625 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002626 unit tests of floating point results.
2627
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002628- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2629 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2630 has been increased.
2631
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002632- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2633 executed.
2634
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002635- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2636 postinstallation script.
2637
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002638- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2639 test the current module.
2640
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002641- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002642 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2643 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2644 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2645 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2646
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002647- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002648 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002649 Ward's Optik package.
2650
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002651- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2652 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2653 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2654 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2655
2656- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2657 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002658 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002659
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002660- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2661 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2662 shelf are binary pickles.
2663
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002664- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2665 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2666
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002667- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2668 modules are iterators now.
2669
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002670- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2671 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2672 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2673 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2674 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2675 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002676
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002677- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2678 with their entity value.
2679
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002680- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2681
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002682- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2683 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002684
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002685- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2686 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002687 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002688
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002689- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2690 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2691 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2692 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2693 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2694 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2695 main():
2696
2697 import locale
2698 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2699
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002700- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2701 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2702
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002703- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2704 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2705 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2706 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2707 to the new standard.
2708
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002709- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2710 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2711 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2712 an extension to the database.
2713
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002714- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2715 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2716 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2717 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002718 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002719
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002720- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002721 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002722
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002723- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2724 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2725 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2726 bounded integers.
2727
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002728- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2729 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2730 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2731 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2732 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2733 in existence.
2734
2735 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2736 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2737 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2738 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2739 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2740 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2741
2742 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2743 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2744 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2745 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2746
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002747- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2748 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2749 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2750
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002751- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2752
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002753- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2754 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2755 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2756 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2757
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002758- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2759 argument.
2760
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002761- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2762 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2763 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2764 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2765 [SF patch 560794].
2766
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002767- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2768 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2769 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002770 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2771 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2772 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002773
2774- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2775 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002776
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002777- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2778 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2779 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2780 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002781
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002782- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2783 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2784 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2785 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2786 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2787
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002788- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002789
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002790- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2791
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002792- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2793 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2794 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2795 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2796 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2797 identical to None.
2798
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002799- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2800 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2801 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2802 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2803 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2804 results now.
2805
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002806- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2807 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2808
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002809- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2810 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2811 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2812 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2813 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2814 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2815 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2816 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2817
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002818- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2819
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002820- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2821 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2822
2823- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2824 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2825 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2826 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2827 and other systems.
2828
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002829- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2830 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2831 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2832 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 +00002833 work well with these.
2834
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002835- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2836
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002837- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002838 connections.
2839
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002840- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2841 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2842 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2843
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002844- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2845 sets
2846
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002847- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2848 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2849 name.
2850
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002851- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2852 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2853 passed in.
2854
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002855- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002856 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002857 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2858 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002859
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002860- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2861
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002862- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2863
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002864- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2865 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2866 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2867
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002868- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2869 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2870 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2871 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002872 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002873
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002874- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002875 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002876 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002877
2878- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2879 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2880 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2881
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002882- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002883 the value of its expression argument.
2884
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002885- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2886 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2887 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2888
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002889- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2890 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2891 skipstone browser was included.
2892
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002893- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2894 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2895
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002896Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002897-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002898
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002899- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2900 names in addition to accepting file names.
2901
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002902- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2903 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2904 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2905 still used and useful.)
2906
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002907- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2908 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2909 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2910 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002911
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002912- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2913 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2914 the generated binary.
2915
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002916Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002917-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002918
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002919- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2920
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002921- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2922 except in the hands of experts.
2923
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002924- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002925 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2926 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2927 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002928
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002929- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2930 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2931 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2932 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2933 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2934 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2935 builds.
2936
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002937- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2938 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2939 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2940 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2941 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2942 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2943 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2944 new type.
2945
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002946- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002947
2948 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2949 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2950 positive infinities.
2951
2952 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2953 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2954 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2955 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2956 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2957 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2958 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2959
2960 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2961
2962 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2963
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002964- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2965 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2966 size of the executable.
2967
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002968- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2969 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2970 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2971 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002972
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002973- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2974
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002975- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2976 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2977 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002978
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002979- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2980 well as Unix.
2981
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002982- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2983 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2984 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2985 modules in the README file for details.
2986
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002987C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002988-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002989
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002990- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2991 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002992 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002993 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002994 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002995
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002996- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2997 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2998 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2999 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3000 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3001 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003002 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003003 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3004 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3005 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3006 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3007 aligned.)
3008
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003009- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3010 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3011 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3012
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003013- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3014 level.
3015
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003016- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3017 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3018 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3019 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3020 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3021
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003022- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3023 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3024 code.
3025
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003026- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3027 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3028 adjusting for negative indices.
3029
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003030- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3031 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3032 object.
3033
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003034- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3035 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3036 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3037
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003038- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3039 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003040
3041- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3042
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003043- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3044 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3045 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3046 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3047
3048- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3049
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003050- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003051
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003052- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003053 without going through the buffer API.
3054
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003055- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003056
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003057- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3058 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3059 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3060 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3061
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003062- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3063 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3064
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003065- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003066 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3067
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003068New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003069-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003070
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003071- OpenVMS is now supported.
3072
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003073- AtheOS is now supported.
3074
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003075- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3076
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003077- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3078
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003079Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003080-----
3081
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003082- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3083 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3084 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003085
3086Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003087-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003088
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003089- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3090 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3091 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3092 bugs.
3093 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003094 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003095 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3096 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003097 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003098
3099- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003100 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003101
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003102- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3103 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3104
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003105- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3106 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003107 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003108 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3109
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003110- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3111 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3112 use files" uninstall option).
3113
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003114- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3115
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003116- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3117 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3118
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003119- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3120 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3121 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3122
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003123- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3124 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3125 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3126 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3127 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003128 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3129 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3130 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003131
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003132- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003133 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003134 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3135 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3136 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3137 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3138 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3139 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3140 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3141 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3142 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3143 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3144 work around.
3145
3146- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3147 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3148 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3149 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3150 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3151 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3152 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3153 specified with O_CREAT too).
3154
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003155Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003156----
3157
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003158- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003159
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003160- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3161 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3162 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3163
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003164- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3165 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3166 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3167
3168- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3169 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3170 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3171 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3172 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3173 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3174 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3175 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003176
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003177- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3178 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3179 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003180
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003181- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3182 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3183 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3184 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3185 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003186
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003187- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3188 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3189 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003190
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003191- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3192 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003193
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003194- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3195 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3196 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3197 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3198 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003199
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003200- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3201 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3202 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3203
3204- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3205 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3206 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003207
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003208- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3209 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3210 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3211 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003212 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003213
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003214- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3215 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003216
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003217- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3218 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003219
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003220- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003221 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003222 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3223 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003224
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003225
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003226What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003227===============================
3228
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003229*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3230
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003231Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003232--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003233
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003234- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3235 with a custom metaclass.
3236
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003237Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003238-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003239
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003240- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3241 are proxies.
3242
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003243Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003244-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003245
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003246- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3247 very short strings.
3248
3249- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3250 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3251 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3252 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3253 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3254
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003255Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003256-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003257
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003258- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3259 close or delete time).
3260
3261- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3262 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3263
3264- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3265
3266- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003267 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003268
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003269Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003270-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003271
3272Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003273-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003274
3275C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003276-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003277
3278New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003279-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003280
3281Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003282-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003283
3284Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003285-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003286
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003287- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3288
3289- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3290 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3291
3292- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3293 deleted at process exit time.
3294
3295- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3296 in backslash.
3297
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003298Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003299----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003300
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003301- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3302 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3303 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3304
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003305
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003306What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003307===========================
3308
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003309*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3310
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003311Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003312--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003313
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003314- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3315 been extensively updated. See
3316
3317 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3318
3319 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3320
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003321- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3322 deleted!
3323
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003324- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3325 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3326 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3327 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3328 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3329
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003330- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3331
3332 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3333 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3334
3335 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3336 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3337 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3338 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3339 supported anyway.
3340
3341 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3342 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3343
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003344- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3345 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3346 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3347 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3348 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003349
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003350- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3351 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3352 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3353
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003354Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003355-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003356
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003357- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3358 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3359 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3360 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3361 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3362 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003363 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3364 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3365 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3366 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003367
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003368- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3369 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3370 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3371
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003372Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003373-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003374
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003375- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3376
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003377Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003378-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003379
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003380- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3381 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3382 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3383 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3384 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3385 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3386
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003387- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3388
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003389- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3390
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003391- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3392
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003393- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3394 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3395 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3396
3397- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3398
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003399Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003400-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003401
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003402- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3403 off a search on Google.
3404
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003405Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003406-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003407
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003408- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3409 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3410 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3411 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3412 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3413 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3414 other platforms should do likewise.
3415
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003416- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3417 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3418 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3419
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003420C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003421-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003422
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003423- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3424 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3425 producing key-value pairs.
3426
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003427- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003428 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003429 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3430 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3431 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3432 previously went unchallenged.
3433
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003434New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003435-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003436
3437Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003438-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003439
3440Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003441-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003442
3443Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003444----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003445
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003446- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3447 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003448
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003449- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3450 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3451 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3452 home.
3453
3454
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003455What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003456===========================
3457
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003458*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3459
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003460Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003461--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003462
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003463- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3464 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003465
3466 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003467 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003468
3469 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3470 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003471 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003472 This needs to be documented.
3473
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003474- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3475 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3476
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003477- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3478 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3479 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3480
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003481- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3482 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3483
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003484- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3485 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3486 class forbids it).
3487
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003488- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3489 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3490 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3491
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003492- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3493
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003494Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003495-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003496
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003497- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3498 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003499 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003500
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003501- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3502 (like 1 + '').
3503
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003504Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003505-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003506
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003507- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3508 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3509 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3510 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003511 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003512 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3513
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003514- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3515 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3516 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3517 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3518
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003519- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3520 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003521 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3522 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3523 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003524
3525- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3526 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003527
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003528- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3529 bytes on its input.
3530
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003531Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003532-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003533
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003534- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003535 convenience function.
3536
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003537- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3538 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3539 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003540 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3541 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3542 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3543 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3544 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3545 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003546
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003547- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3548 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3549 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3550 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3551
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003552- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3553 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3554 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3555
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003556- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3557 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3558 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3559 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3560
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003561- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3562 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003563 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003564 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3565 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3566 new -l and -e options.
3567
3568- statcache is now deprecated.
3569
3570- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3571 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003572 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003573 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3574 time properly taken into account.
3575
3576- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3577 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3578 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3579 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3580
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003581Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003582-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003583
3584Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003585-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003586
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003587- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3588 is built with libdb3 if available.
3589
3590- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3591
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003592C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003593-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003594
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003595- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3596 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3597 PySequence_Size().
3598
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003599- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3600
3601- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3602 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3603 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3604
3605- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3606 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3607
3608- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3609 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3610
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003611New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003612-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003613
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003614- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3615 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3616
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003617- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3618 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3619
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003620- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3621
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003622Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003623-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003624
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003625- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3626 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3627
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003628Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003629-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003630
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003631Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003632----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003633
3634- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3635 removed completely in the next release.
3636
3637- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3638 OSX.
3639
3640- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3641 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3642
3643- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3644
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003645
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003646What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003647===========================
3648
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003649*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3650
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003651Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003652--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003653
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003654- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003655 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003656 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003657 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3658 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003659 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3660 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003661 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3662 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003663
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003664- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3665 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3666
3667- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3668 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3669
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003670Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003671-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003672
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003673- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3674 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3675 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3676 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3677 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3678 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3679 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3680 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3681
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003682- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3683 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3684 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3685 example).
3686
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003687- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003688 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003689 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003690 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003691
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003692- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3693 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3694 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003695 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003696
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003697- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3698 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3699 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3700 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3701 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3702 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3703
3704 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3705
3706 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3707
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003708Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003709-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003710
3711- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3712
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003713- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3714
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003715- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3716 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003717
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003718- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3719 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3720 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3721 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3722 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3723 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003724 attributes.
3725
3726- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3727 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3728 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003729
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003730- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3731 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3732 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003733
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003734- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3735 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3736 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003737 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3738 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3739
3740- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3741 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003742
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003743Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003744-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003745
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003746- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3747 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3748
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003749- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3750 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3751 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3752 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3753
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003754- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3755 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3756 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3757 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3758
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003759 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3760 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3761 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3762 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3763 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3764 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3765 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3766 without losing information).
3767
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003768- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003769 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3770 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3771 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3772 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3773 module).
3774
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003775 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003776 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3777 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3778 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3779 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003780
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003781- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003782 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3783 encoding.
3784
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003785- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3786 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3787
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003788- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003789 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3790
3791- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3792 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3793 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3794 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3795
3796- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3797
3798- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3799 ON, and OFF.
3800
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003801- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3802 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3803
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003804Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003805-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003806
3807- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3808 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3809 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003810
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003811- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3812 been added: -X and -E.
3813
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003814Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003815-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003816
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003817- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3818 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3819
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003820C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003821-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003822
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003823- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3824 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3825 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3826 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3827 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3828
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003829- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3830 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3831 as long) arguments.
3832
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003833- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3834 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3835 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3836 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3837 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3838 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3839
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003840- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3841 input.
3842
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003843New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003844-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003845
3846Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003847-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003848
3849Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003850-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003851
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003852- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3853 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3854 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3855
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003856- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3857 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3858 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003859 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003860
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003861 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3862 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3863 import signal
3864 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003865
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003866 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003867 while 1:
3868 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003869 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003870 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3871 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3872 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3873 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003874
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003875
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003876What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3877===========================
3878
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003879*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3880
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003881Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003882--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003883
3884- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3885 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3886 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3887
3888- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3889 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3890 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3891 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3892 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3893 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3894 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003895
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003896- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003897 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003898 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3899 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3900 associate a docstring with a property.
3901
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003902- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3903 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3904 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3905 other built-in object types.
3906
3907- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3908 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3909 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3910 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3911 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3912
3913- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3914 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3915
3916- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3917 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003918 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003919 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3920 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3921 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3922 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3923 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3924
3925- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3926 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3927 class.
3928
3929- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3930 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3931 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3932 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3933
3934- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3935 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3936 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3937 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3938
3939- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3940 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3941
3942- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3943 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3944 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3945 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3946 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003947 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003948 with the same value as s.
3949
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003950- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3951
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003952Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003953----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003954
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003955- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3956
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003957- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3958 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3959 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3960 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3961 objects.
3962
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003963- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3964 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003965 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3966 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3967
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003968- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3969 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3970 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3971
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003972Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003973-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003974
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003975- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3976 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3977 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3978 by the instances.
3979
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003980- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3981 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3982 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3983
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003984- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3985 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3986 before the entire comparison is complete.
3987
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003988- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3989 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3990 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3991
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003992- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3993 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3994 getwriter().
3995
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003996- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3997 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3998
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003999- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004000 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4001 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4002
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004003- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4004 iterable object.
4005
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004006- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4007 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004008
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004009- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4010 authentication.
4011
4012- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4013 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004014
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004015- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004016 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4017 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4018 a sample driver.)
4019
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004020Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004021-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004022
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004023- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4024 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4025 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4026 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4027 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4028 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4029 kernel has large file support.
4030
4031- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4032 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4033 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4034 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4035 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4036
4037- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4038 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4039 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4040
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004041C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004042-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004043
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004044- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4045 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4046
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004047New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004048-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004049
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004050- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4051 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4052
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004053Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004054-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004055
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004056- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4057 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4058 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4059 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4060 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4061
4062- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4063 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4064 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4065 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4066
4067- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4068 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4069
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004070Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004071-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004072
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004073- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004074 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4075 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004076
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004077
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004078What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4079===========================
4080
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004081*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4082
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004083Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004084----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004085
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004086- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4087 big to represent as a C double.
4088
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004089- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4090 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4091 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4092 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4093 restriction).
4094
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004095- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4096 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4097 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4098 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4099 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4100
4101 >>> dir([])
4102 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4103 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4104 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4105 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4106 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4107 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4108 'reverse', 'sort']
4109
4110 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4111
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004112- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004113 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4114 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4115 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4116 OverflowError exception.
4117
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004118- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004119 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004120 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4121 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4122 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4123 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4124 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004125 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004126 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4127 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4128
4129 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4130 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4131 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4132 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004133
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004134- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004135 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4136 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4137 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4138 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4139 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4140 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4141 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4142 once it is created.
4143
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004144- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4145 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4146 (key, value) pairs.
4147
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004148- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004149 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4150 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4151
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004152- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4153 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4154 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4155 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4156 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004157
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004158- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004159 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4160 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4161
4162 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4163
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004164- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004165 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4166
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004167Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004168-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004169
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004170- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004171 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4172 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004173
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004174- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4175 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4176 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4177 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4178 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4179 in this area anymore).
4180
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004181- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4182 threading.Timer.
4183
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004184- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4185 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4186
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004187- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004188 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4189
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004190- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004191 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4192 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4193 converted to Python longs.
4194
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004195- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004196 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4197
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004198- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4199 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4200 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4201
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004202Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004203-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004204
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004205- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4206 division operators as per PEP 238.
4207
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004208Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004209-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004210
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004211- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4212 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4213 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4214 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4215
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004216C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004217-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004218
4219- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004220
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004221- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4222 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004223 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004224
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004225 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4226 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004227 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004228 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004229
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004230- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004231 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4232 module:
4233
4234 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004235
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004236 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4237 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004238
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004239 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4240 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004241
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004242 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4243
4244 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4245
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004246- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004247 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4248 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4249 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004250
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004251New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004252-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004253
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004254- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4255 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4256 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4257 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4258 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004259
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004260Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004261-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004262
4263Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004264-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004265
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004266- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4267 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4268 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4269 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004270 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4271 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4272 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4273 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4274 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004275
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004276- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004277 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4278
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004279
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004280What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4281===========================
4282
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004283*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4284
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004285Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004286-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004287
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004288- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4289 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4290
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004291- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4292 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4293 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004294
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004295- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4296 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4297 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4298 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004299
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004300- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4301
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004302- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004303
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004304Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004305-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004306
4307- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004308 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004309 the module docstring for details.
4310
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004311Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004312-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004313
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004314- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004315 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4316 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4317 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004318
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004319- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4320 Nick Mathewson.
4321
4322Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004323----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004324
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004325- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4326 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4327 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4328 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4329 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4330 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4331 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4332 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4333
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004334- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4335 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4336 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4337 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4338
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004339- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4340 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4341 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4342 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4343 come a long way).
4344
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004345- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4346 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4347 write filters for these warnings).
4348
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004349- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4350 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4351 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4352 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4353 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4354
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004355- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4356 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4357 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4358 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4359 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4360 older distribution.
4361
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004362Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004363-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004364
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004365- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4366 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004367 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004368
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004369- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4370 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4371 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4372
4373- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4374
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004375- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4376
4377- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4378
4379- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4380
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004381- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004382
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004383- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4384
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004385New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004386-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004387
4388C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004389-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004390
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004391- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4392 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4393 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4394 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4395 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4396 against buffer overruns.
4397
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004398- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004399 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4400 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004401 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4402 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4403 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4404
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004405- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4406 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4407 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4408 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4409 deprecated.
4410
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004411Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004412-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004413
4414- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4415 relevant is found.
4416
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004417
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004418What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004419===========================
4420
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004421*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4422
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004423Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004424----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004425
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004426- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4427 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4428 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4429 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4430 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4431 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4432 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4433 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004434 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004435 repaired.
4436
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004437- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004438 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004439 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4440 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4441 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4442 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4443 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4444 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4445 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4446 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4447
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004448- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4449 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4450 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4451 leading BMO character).
4452
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004453- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4454 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4455 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4456
4457 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4458 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4459 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004460
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004461 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4462 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4463 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4464 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4465 for various simple to use conversions.
4466
4467 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4468 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4469
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004470 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4471 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4472 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4473 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4474 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4475 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4476 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4477 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4478 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4479 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4480 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4481 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4482 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4483 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4484 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004485
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004486- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4487 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4488 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004489 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004490 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004491
4492 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004493 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4494 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4495 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4496 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4497 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004498 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4499 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004500
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004501 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4502 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4503 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004504 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004505
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004506- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4507 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4508 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4509 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4510 floating arithmetic,
4511
4512 x = 9007199254740992.0
4513 print long(x)
4514
4515 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4516 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4517 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4518 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4519 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4520 functions are of good quality).
4521
4522 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4523 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4524 algorithms to break.
4525
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004526- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4527 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4528 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4529 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4530 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4531 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4532 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4533 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4534 order.
4535
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004536- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4537 operation along the most common code paths.
4538
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004539- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4540 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4541
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004542- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4543 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4544 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4545 {}.update(UserDict())
4546
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004547- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4548 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4549 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4550 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4551 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4552 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4553 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4554 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4555
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004556- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004557 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004558
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004559 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004560 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4561 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004562 join() method of strings
4563 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004564 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4565 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004566 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004567 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004568
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004569- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4570 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4571
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004572- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4573 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4574
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004575- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4576 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4577 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4578 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4579
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004580- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4581 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004582 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004583 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4584 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004585
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004586- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4587
4588
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004589Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004590-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004591
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004592- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004593 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004594 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4595 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4596
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004597- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4598 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4599
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004600- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4601 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4602 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4603 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4604
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004605- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4606 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4607 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4608
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004609- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4610
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004611- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4612
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004613- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4614 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4615 that are still imported into string.py).
4616
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004617- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4618
4619- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4620 Now it does.
4621
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004622- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4623
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004624- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4625 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4626 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4627 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4628 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004629 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4630 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004631
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004632- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4633 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4634 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4635 'help(object)'.
4636
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004637Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004638-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004639
4640- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004641 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004642 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4643 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4644
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004645- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004646 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4647 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004648
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004649C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004650-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004651
4652- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4653 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004654
4655----
4656
4657**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**