blob: bf40e9de0a5026274c18f4dcc9be2e4a9f34be4a [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2006*
11
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000012Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Neal Norwitz40d37812005-10-02 01:48:49 +000015- Fix segfault with invalid coding.
16
17- SF bug #772896: unknown encoding results in MemoryError.
18
Raymond Hettinger6b27cda2005-09-24 21:23:05 +000019- All iterators now have a Boolean value of true. Formerly, some iterators
20 supported a __len__() method which evaluated to False when the iterator
21 was empty.
22
Guido van Rossum630db602005-09-20 18:49:54 +000023- On 64-bit platforms, when __len__() returns a value that cannot be
24 represented as a C int, raise OverflowError.
25
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000026- test__locale is skipped on OS X < 10.4 (only partial locale support is
27present).
28
Georg Brandl80bbf3f2005-09-14 19:38:29 +000029- SF bug #893549: parsing keyword arguments was broken with a few format
30 codes.
31
Guido van Rossum8ee3e5a2005-09-14 18:09:42 +000032- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on AIX 5.3
33 with IBM's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1284289). This also closes SF
34 bug #105470: test_pwd fails on 64bit system (Opteron).
35
Guido van Rossum539c6622005-09-14 17:49:54 +000036- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on HP-UX 11 on
37 Itanium2 with HP's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1225212).
38
Georg Brandl4550b8d2005-08-26 06:43:52 +000039- Disallow keyword arguments for type constructors that don't use them
Georg Brandl02c42872005-08-26 06:42:30 +000040 (fixes bug #1119418).
41
Martin v. Löwisd35edda2005-08-24 08:39:24 +000042- Forward UnicodeDecodeError into SyntaxError for source encoding errors.
43
Barry Warsawe2eca0b2005-08-15 18:14:19 +000044- SF bug #900092: When tracing (e.g. for hotshot), restore 'return' events for
45 exceptions that cause a function to exit.
46
Raymond Hettinger9f1a6792005-07-31 01:16:36 +000047- The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
48 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
49 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
50
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +000051- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
52
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +000053- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
54 reference counts in some error exit cases.
55
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000056- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
57 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
58 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
59 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
60 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
61 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
62 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
63 realloc.
64
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +000065- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
66 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
67
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +000068- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
69 like their int counterparts.
70
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +000071- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
72 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
73 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
74 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
75 for a longer write-up of the problem).
76
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +000077- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
78 serializing floats.
79
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +000080- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
81 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
82 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
83
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +000084- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
85 278.
86
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +000087- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
88 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
89 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
90 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +000091 to the base class has been moved to the proper nb_* magic slot and out of
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +000092 PyNumber_*().
93 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
94
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +000095- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
96 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
97 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
98 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
99
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +0000100- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
101 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
102 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
103 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
104 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
105
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +0000106- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
107 disabled caused a crash.
108
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000109- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
110 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
111
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000112- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +0000113 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
114
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +0000115- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
116
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000117- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +0000118 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
119 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
120 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000121
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +0000122- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
123
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +0000124- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
125 returning None.
126
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000127- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +0000128 ('\') with a specific error message.
129
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +0000130- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
131
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +0000132- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
133 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
134
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000135- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000136 an ferror() call.
137
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000138- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
139 list.sort().
140
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000141- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
142 (2+3) --> (5).
143
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000144- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
145
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000146- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
147 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000148
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000149- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
150 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
151 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
152
Neil Schemenauercf52c072005-08-12 17:34:58 +0000153- Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a
154 unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and
155 calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance.
156
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000157Extension Modules
158-----------------
159
Neal Norwitz484d9a42005-09-30 04:46:49 +0000160- Patch #1309009, Fix segfault in pyexpat when the XML document is in latin_1,
161 but Python incorrectly assumes it is in UTF-8 format
162
Georg Brandle677adc2005-09-29 13:40:49 +0000163- Fix parse errors in the readline module when compiling without threads.
164
Hye-Shik Chang9ceebd52005-09-24 14:58:47 +0000165- Patch #1288833: Removed thread lock from socket.getaddrinfo on
166 FreeBSD 5.3 and later versions which got thread-safe getaddrinfo(3).
167
Michael W. Hudson10402a32005-09-22 09:19:01 +0000168- Patches #1298449 and #1298499: Add some missing checks for error
169 returns in cStringIO.c.
170
Neal Norwitz058bde12005-09-21 06:44:25 +0000171- Patch #1297028: fix segfault if call type on MultibyteCodec,
172 MultibyteStreamReader, or MultibyteStreamWriter
173
Neal Norwitzcfe7dd92005-09-19 06:49:27 +0000174- Fix memory leak in posix.access().
175
Martin v. Löwis8b291e22005-09-18 08:17:56 +0000176- Patch #1213831: Fix typo in unicodedata._getcode.
177
Georg Brandlfb1ef852005-09-14 20:53:32 +0000178- Bug #1007046: os.startfile() did not accept unicode strings encoded in
179 the file system encoding.
180
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000181- Patch #756021: Special-case socket.inet_aton('255.255.255.255') for
182 platforms that don't have inet_aton().
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000183
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000184- Bug #1215928: Fix bz2.BZ2File.seek() for 64-bit file offsets.
185
186- Bug #1191043: Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines for files containing one
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000187 line without newlines.
188
Georg Brandl38387b82005-08-24 07:17:40 +0000189- Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did
190 on Windows.
191
Martin v. Löwisebd9d5b2005-08-09 15:00:59 +0000192- Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
193 st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
194
Michael W. Hudson8137bea2005-07-27 20:24:40 +0000195- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
196 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
197 for large or negative values.
198
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000199- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000200 implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false.
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000201
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000202- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
203
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000204- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
205 if available on the platform.
206
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000207- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
208 available on the platform.
209
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000210- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
211 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
212
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000213- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
214
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000215- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
216 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
217 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
218
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000219- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
220
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000221- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
222 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
223
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000224- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000225 file size.
226
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000227- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
228
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000229- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
230 {remove_history,replace_history}
231
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000232- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
233 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000234
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000235- stat_float_times is now True.
236
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000237- array.array objects are now picklable.
238
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000239- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
240 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
241
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000242- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
243 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
244 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
245
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000246- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
247 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000248
249Library
250-------
251
Georg Brandl8b813db2005-10-01 16:32:31 +0000252- Bug #729103: pydoc.py: Fix docother() method to accept additional
253 "parent" argument.
254
Georg Brandlaa935172005-09-29 20:49:16 +0000255- Patch #1300515: xdrlib.py: Fix pack_fstring() to really use null bytes
256 for padding.
257
Georg Brandl80ba8e82005-09-29 20:16:07 +0000258- Bug #1296004: httplib.py: Limit maximal amount of data read from the
259 socket to avoid a MemoryError on Windows.
260
Matthias Klosef3f231f2005-09-20 07:02:49 +0000261- Patch #1166948: locale.py: Prefer LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE and LANG over LANGUAGE
262 to get the correct encoding.
263
264- Patch #1166938: locale.py: Parse LANGUAGE as a colon separated list of
265 languages.
266
Martin v. Löwis4ed67382005-09-18 08:34:39 +0000267- Patch #1268314: Cache lines in StreamReader.readlines for performance.
268
Brett Cannona783d062005-09-15 02:34:56 +0000269- Bug #1290505: Fix clearing the regex cache for time.strptime().
270
Martin v. Löwis5dbdc592005-08-27 10:07:56 +0000271- Bug #1167128: Fix size of a symlink in a tarfile to be 0.
272
Georg Brandl5a650a22005-08-26 08:51:34 +0000273- Patch #810023: Fix off-by-one bug in urllib.urlretrieve reporthook
274 functionality.
275
Martin v. Löwis8b595142005-08-25 11:03:38 +0000276- Bug #1163178: Make IDNA return an empty string when the input is empty.
277
Georg Brandl532efab2005-08-24 22:34:21 +0000278- Patch #848017: Make Cookie more RFC-compliant. Use CRLF as default output
279 separator and do not output trailing semicola.
280
Georg Brandlb9256022005-08-24 18:46:39 +0000281- Patch #1062060: urllib.urlretrieve() now raises a new exception, named
282 ContentTooShortException, when the actually downloaded size does not
283 match the Content-Length header.
284
Martin v. Löwis0a5d4a22005-08-24 14:55:22 +0000285- Bug #1121494: distutils.dir_utils.mkpath now accepts Unicode strings.
286
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000287- Bug #1178484: Return complete lines from codec stream readers
288 even if there is an exception in later lines, resulting in
289 correct line numbers for decoding errors in source code.
290
Georg Brandl6d2b3462005-08-24 07:36:17 +0000291- Bug #1192315: Disallow negative arguments to clear() in pdb.
292
Martin v. Löwisb813c532005-08-07 20:51:04 +0000293- Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
294
Georg Brandl649f8e72005-08-03 07:30:12 +0000295- Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
296 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
297
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000298- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
299 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
300 Tkdnd.
301
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000302- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
303 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
304
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000305- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
306 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
307
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000308- textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000309 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
310
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000311- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
312 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
313
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000314- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
315 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
316
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000317- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000318 it can be missing in embedded interpreters
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000319
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000320- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
321
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000322- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
323 error messages.
324
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000325- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
326
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000327- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
328 Bug #1224621.
329
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000330- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
331 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
332 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
333 terminates by raising StopIteration.
334
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000335- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
336
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000337- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
338 component of the path.
339
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000340- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
341 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
342 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
343 class at all.
344
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000345- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
346 files to PyPI.
347
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000348- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
349 them to PyPI.
350
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000351- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
352 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
353 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
354 work as expected.
355
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000356- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
357 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
358
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000359- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000360 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
361
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000362- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
363
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000364- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
365 to build.
366
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000367- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
368 symbolic links on Windows.
369
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000370- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000371 profile.py if available.
372
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000373- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
374
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000375- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
376 in LWPCookieJar.
377
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000378- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
379
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000380- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
381
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000382- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
383
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000384- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
385
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000386- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
387
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000388- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
389
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000390- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
391
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000392- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
393
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000394- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
395 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
396 be exploited in various ways.
397
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000398- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
399
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000400- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
401
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000402- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
403
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000404- Enhancements to the csv module:
405
406 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000407 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000408 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000409 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
410 reporting.
411 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
412 dictates.
413 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000414 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000415 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000416 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
417 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000418 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
419 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000420 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000421 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
422 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
423 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
424 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
425 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
426 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
427 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
428 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
429 without first creating a dialect class.
430 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
431 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
432 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000433 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000434 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
435 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000436 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
437 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
438 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
439 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000440 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
441 This has been fixed.
442
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000443- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
444 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
445 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
446 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
447
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000448- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
449
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000450- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
451 (Bug #951915).
452
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000453- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
454 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
455 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000456 encoding alias table.
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000457
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000458- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
459
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000460- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
461 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
462
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000463- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
464
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000465- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
466
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000467- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
468
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000469- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
470
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000471- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
472
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000473- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
474 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
475 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
476
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000477- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000478 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000479
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000480- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
481 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
482 tokenizer with very long source lines.
483
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000484- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
485 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
486
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000487- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
488 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000489
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000490- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
491 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
492
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000493- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
494 correctly.
495
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000496- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
497 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
498 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
499 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
500 between two lines.
501
Walter Dörwalda47d1c02005-08-30 10:23:14 +0000502- Bug #1251300: On UCS-4 builds the "unicode-internal" codec will now complain
503 about illegal code points. The codec now supports PEP 293 style error
504 handlers.
505
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000506- Bug #1235646: ``codecs.StreamRecoder.next()`` now reencodes the data it reads
Walter Dörwaldc5238b82005-09-01 11:56:53 +0000507 from the input stream, so that the output is a byte string in the correct
508 encoding instead of a unicode string.
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000509
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000510- Bug #1202493: Fixing SRE parser to handle '{}' as perl does, rather than
511 considering it exactly like a '*'.
512
513
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000514Build
515-----
516
Martin v. Löwis147fbe52005-08-07 21:09:30 +0000517- Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
518 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
519
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000520- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
521 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
522
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000523- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
524 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
525 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000526 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000527
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000528- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
529 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
530 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
531
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000532- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
533
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000534- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
535 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
536
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000537- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
538 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
539 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
540 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
541 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
542 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
543 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
544 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
545
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000546- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
547 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
548 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
549 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
550
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000551
552C API
553-----
554
Raymond Hettingerbeb31012005-08-16 03:47:52 +0000555- Added a C API for set and frozenset objects.
556
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000557- Removed PyRange_New().
558
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000559
560Tests
561-----
562
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000563- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000564
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000565
566Documentation
567-------------
568
Georg Brandl32252422005-09-14 20:42:00 +0000569- Bug #1274828: Document os.path.splitunc().
570
Georg Brandl79c122f2005-08-24 07:31:33 +0000571- Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py.
572
Georg Brandl6f2bbd32005-08-24 07:26:55 +0000573- Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation.
574
Georg Brandlf13c4ba2005-08-02 10:28:08 +0000575- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
576
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000577- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
578
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000579- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
580
581- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
582
583- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
584
585- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
586
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000587- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
588 Closes bug #1166582.
589
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000590- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
591 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
592 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
593
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000594Mac
595---
596
597
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000598New platforms
599-------------
600
601- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
602
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000603
604Tools/Demos
605-----------
606
Georg Brandl56897312005-08-24 18:32:30 +0000607- Added two new files to Tools/scripts: pysource.py, which recursively
608 finds Python source files, and findnocoding.py, which finds Python
609 source files that need an encoding declaration.
610 Patch #784089, credits to Oleg Broytmann.
611
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000612- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
613
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000614- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000615
616
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000617What's New in Python 2.4 final?
618===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000619
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000620*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000621
622Core and builtins
623-----------------
624
625- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
626 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
627 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
628
629
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000630What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
631==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000632
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000633*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000634
635Core and builtins
636-----------------
637
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000638- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
639 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
640 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
641
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000642
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000643Library
644-------
645
646- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
647 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
648 raised is re-raised.
649
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000650- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
651 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
652
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000653- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
654 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
655 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
656 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
657 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
658 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
659 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
660 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
661 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
662 by the slice are recomputed now.
663
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000664- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000665
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000666Build
667-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000668
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000669- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
670 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
671 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000672
673C API
674-----
675
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000676- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
677
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000678
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000679What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
680================================
681
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000682*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000683
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000684License
685-------
686
687The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
688is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
689changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
690Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
691intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
692durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
693the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
694License::
695
696 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
697
698says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
699to Python 2.1.1.
700
701The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
702License Version 2.
703
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000704Core and builtins
705-----------------
706
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000707- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
708 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
709 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
710 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
711 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
712 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
713 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
714 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
715 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
716 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
717
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000718- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000719
720Extension Modules
721-----------------
722
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000723- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
724 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
725 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
726 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000727
728Library
729-------
730
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000731- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
732 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
733 returned.
734
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000735- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
736
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000737- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
738 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
739
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000740- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
741
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000742- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
743 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000744
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000745- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
746
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000747- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
748
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000749- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000750 the source code is updated and reloaded.
751
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000752Build
753-----
754
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000755- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000756
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000757What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
758================================
759
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000760*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000761
762Core and builtins
763-----------------
764
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000765- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000766 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
767
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000768- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
769 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
770 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
771 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
772
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000773- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
774 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
775
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000776- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
777 constant.
778
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000779- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
780 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
781 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
782 large), and to anomalies such as
783 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
784 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
785 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
786 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000787
788Extension modules
789-----------------
790
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000791- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
792 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000793 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
794 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
795 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000796
797Library
798-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000799
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000800- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000801 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000802 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
803 --swig-cpp.
804
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000805- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
806 it is set.
807
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000808- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000809
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000810- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
811 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
812 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
813 Closes bug #1039270.
814
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000815- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000816
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000817 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000818 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
819 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
820 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
821 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
822 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
823 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
824 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
825 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
826 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
827 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
828 + Updates to documentation.
829
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000830- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
831 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
832 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
833 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
834
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000835- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000836
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000837- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
838 applications should use the getmember function.
839
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000840- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
841
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000842- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
843 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
844 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
845 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
846 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
847 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
848 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
849 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
850 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
851
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000852- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
853 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000854 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000855
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000856- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
857 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
858 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
859 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
860 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
861 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
862 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
863 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000864
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000865- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
866 the new public features (of which there are many).
867
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000868- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000869 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
870 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
871 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
872 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000873 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000874
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000875- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
876
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000877- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
878 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
879 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
880 options.
881
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000882- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
883 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
884 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
885 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
886 conditions under which non-string values work.
887
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000888Build
889-----
890
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000891- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
892 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
893 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
894
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000895- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
896 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
897 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
898 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
899 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000900
901C API
902-----
903
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000904- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
905 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
906
907- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
908
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000909- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
910 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
911 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
912 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
913 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
914 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
915 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
916 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
917 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
918
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000919- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
920
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000921- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
922 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
923 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000924
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000925Tests
926-----
927
928- test__locale ported to unittest
929
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000930Mac
931---
932
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000933- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
934 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
935 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000936
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000937Tools/Demos
938-----------
939
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000940- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
941 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
942 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
943 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
944 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000945
946
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000947What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
948=================================
949
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000950*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000951
952Core and builtins
953-----------------
954
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000955- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000956 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
957
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000958- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
959 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
960 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
961 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
962 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
963 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
964 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
965 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000966 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
967 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
968 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
969 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
970 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000971
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000972- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
973 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
974 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
975 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
976 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
977
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000978- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
979
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000980- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
981 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
982
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000983- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
984 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
985 modified the list.
986
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000987- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
988 functions is now writable.
989
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000990- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
991 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
992 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
993 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
994
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000995- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
996 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
997 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
998 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
999 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +00001000
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +00001001- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
1002 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
1003
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001004Extension modules
1005-----------------
1006
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001007- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
1008
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +00001009- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
1010 data.
1011
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001012- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
1013 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
1014 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
1015 supposed to have been truncated away.
1016
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +00001017- Added socket.socketpair().
1018
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +00001019- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
1020 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
1021
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001022- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +00001023 versions of Python, have now been removed.
1024
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001025Library
1026-------
1027
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001028- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001029 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001030
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +00001031- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
1032 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
1033
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +00001034- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
1035 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
1036
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001037- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
1038
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +00001039- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
1040 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +00001041
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +00001042- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
1043 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
1044
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +00001045- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
1046
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +00001047- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
1048
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +00001049- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
1050
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +00001051- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
1052 Percivall.
1053
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +00001054- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
1055 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
1056
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001057- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
1058 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
1059 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001060 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001061
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001062- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
1063 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
1064 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
1065 and exponent.
1066
1067- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
1068
1069- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +00001070 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001071 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
1072
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001073- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
1074 to the readline module.
1075
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001076- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001077 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
1078 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001079
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +00001080- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
1081 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
1082 contains symlinks.
1083
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +00001084- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
1085 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
1086
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +00001087- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
1088 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
1089 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1090
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001091- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
1092 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
1093 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
1094 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
1095 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
1096 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
1097 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
1098 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
1099 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
1100 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
1101 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
1102 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
1103 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
1104
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +00001105- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
1106
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001107Tools/Demos
1108-----------
1109
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001110- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
1111 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
1112
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +00001113- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
1114
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001115Build
1116-----
1117
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001118- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
1119 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
1120 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
1121 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
1122 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
1123 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
1124 plans to do so.
1125
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +00001126- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
1127 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
1128
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +00001129- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
1130 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
1131
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001132- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
1133 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
1134
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +00001135- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
1136 GNU/k*BSD systems.
1137
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +00001138- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
1139 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
1140
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001141C API
1142-----
1143
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001144..
1145
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001146Documentation
1147-------------
1148
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001149- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1150 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1151
1152- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1153 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1154 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001155
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001156New platforms
1157-------------
1158
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001159- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1160
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001161Tests
1162-----
1163
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001164..
1165
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001166Windows
1167-------
1168
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001169- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1170 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1171 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1172 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1173 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1174 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1175 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1176 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1177 the problem.
1178
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001179Mac
1180---
1181
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001182..
1183
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001184
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001185What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1186=================================
1187
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001188*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001189
1190Core and builtins
1191-----------------
1192
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001193- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1194 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1195 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1196 sensitive code.
1197
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001198- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001199 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001200
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001201 @staticmethod
1202 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001203
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001204 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001205
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001206- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1207 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1208 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1209 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1210 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1211 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1212 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1213 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1214 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1215 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1216 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1217
1218 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1219 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1220 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1221 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1222 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1223 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1224 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1225
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001226- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1227 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1228
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001229- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001230 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001231
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001232- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001233 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001234 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1235
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001236- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001237 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1238 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1239
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001240- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1241 types that support garbage collection.
1242
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001243- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1244
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001245- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1246 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1247 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1248 Jython.
1249
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001250- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1251
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001252- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1253 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1254
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001255- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1256 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1257 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001258
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001259- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1260 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1261 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1262
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001263Extension modules
1264-----------------
1265
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001266- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1267
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001268Library
1269-------
1270
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001271- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1272 TIS-620
1273
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001274- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1275 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1276 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1277 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1278 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1279 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1280 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1281 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1282 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1283 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1284
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001285- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1286
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001287- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1288 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1289 same as when the argument is omitted).
1290 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1291
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001292- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1293
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001294- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1295 schemes are offered.
1296
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001297- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1298
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001299- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1300 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1301 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1302
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001303- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1304
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001305- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1306 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1307
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001308- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1309 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1310 when dummy_threading is being used.
1311
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001312- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1313 from a tarfile.
1314
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001315- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001316 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001317
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001318- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1319 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1320 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1321 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1322
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001323- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1324 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1325
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001326- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1327 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1328 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1329 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1330 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1331 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1332 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1333 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1334 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1335 by some other method in progress).
1336
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001337- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1338 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1339 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001340
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001341- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1342
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001343- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1344 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1345 AM Kuchling.
1346
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001347- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1348 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1349 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1350
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001351- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1352 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1353 instead of unsigned.
1354
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001355- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001356 no longer part of the public API.
1357
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001358- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1359 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1360 string methods of the same name).
1361
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001362- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001363 SF patch 945642.
1364
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001365- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1366
1367 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1368
1369 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1370 DocTestSuites.
1371
1372- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1373 that provide thread-local data.
1374
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001375- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1376 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1377
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001378- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1379
1380- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1381 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1382 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1383
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001384- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1385
1386 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1387 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1388 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001389
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001390 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1391 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1392 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1393 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1394
1395 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1396 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1397
1398 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1399 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1400 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1401 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1402
1403 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1404 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1405 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1406 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1407 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1408
1409 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1410 wrapping help output.
1411
1412 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1413 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1414 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001415
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001416C API
1417-----
1418
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001419- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1420 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1421 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1422 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1423 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1424 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1425 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1426 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1427 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1428 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1429 its visible semantics have not changed.
1430
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001431- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1432 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1433
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001434Documentation
1435-------------
1436
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001437- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001438
1439 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001440 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001441
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001442 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001443
1444 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1445
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001446- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001447
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001448Tests
1449-----
1450
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001451- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001452 platforms that use the Makefile.
1453
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001454- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1455 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1456 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1457
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001458
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001459What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1460=================================
1461
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001462*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001463
1464Core and builtins
1465-----------------
1466
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001467- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1468 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1469 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1470 objects now (one object instead of three).
1471
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001472- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1473 Windows DLLs.
1474
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001475- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1476 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001477
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001478- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1479 a new .pyc magic.
1480
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001481- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1482 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1483 be there.
1484
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001485- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1486 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1487 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1488
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001489- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1490 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1491 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1492
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001493- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1494
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001495- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1496 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1497 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001498
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001499- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1500 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1501
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001502- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1503
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001504- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001505 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001506
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001507- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1508
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001509- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1510
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001511- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1512 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1513
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001514- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1515 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1516 Fixes bug #858016 .
1517
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001518- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1519 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1520 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1521
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001522- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1523 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1524 improves their performance (about 35%).
1525
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001526- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1527 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1528 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1529
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001530- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1531 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1532 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1533 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1534
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001535- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1536 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001537 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001538 length is not known).
1539
1540- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1541 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001542 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1543 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001544 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1545
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001546- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1547 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1548
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001549- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1550 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1551 keyword arguments.
1552
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001553- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1554 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1555 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1556
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001557- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1558 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1559 cases.
1560
1561- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1562 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1563 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1564 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1565 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1566 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1567 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1568 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1569 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1570 a release build.
1571
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001572- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1573 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1574
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001575- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001576 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001577
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001578- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1579 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1580 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1581 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1582 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1583 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1584 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1585 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1586 destroyed.
1587
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001588- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1589 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1590 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1591 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1592 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1593 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1594 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1595 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1596
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001597- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1598 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1599 character other than a space.
1600
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001601- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1602 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1603 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1604 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1605 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1606 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1607 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1608 attributes with the same name.
1609
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001610- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1611 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1612 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1613 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1614 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1615 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1616 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1617 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1618 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1619 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1620 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1621 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1622 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1623 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001624
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001625- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1626 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1627 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1628 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1629 This has been repaired.
1630
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001631- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1632
1633- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1634
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001635- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1636 over a sequence.
1637
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001638- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001639 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001640
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001641- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1642
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001643- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1644 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1645 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1646 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1647 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1648 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1649 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1650 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1651
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001652- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1653 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1654 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1655
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001656- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1657 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1658 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1659 freelist.
1660
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001661- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1662 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1663
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001664- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1665 number.
1666
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001667- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1668 a TypeError exception.
1669
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001670- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1671 820195.
1672
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001673- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1674 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1675 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1676
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001677- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001678 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1679 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001680
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001681- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1682 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1683 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1684
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001685- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1686 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001687 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001688
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001689- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001690 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1691 the first call.
1692
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001693
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001694Extension modules
1695-----------------
1696
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001697- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1698 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1699
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001700- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1701 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1702 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1703 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1704 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1705 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1706 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001707
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001708- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1709
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001710- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1711
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001712- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1713 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1714
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001715- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1716 fewer false positives.
1717
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001718- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1719 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1720
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001721- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001722 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1723
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001724- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001725 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001726 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001727 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1728 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001729
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001730- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1731 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1732 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1733 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1734
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001735- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1736 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1737 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1738 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1739 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1740 #897625.
1741
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001742- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1743 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1744
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001745- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1746 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1747 and pops on either side of the deque.
1748
1749- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1750 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1751
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001752- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1753 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1754 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1755 other functions that expect a function argument.
1756
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001757- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1758
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001759- os.getsid was added.
1760
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001761- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1762 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1763 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1764
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001765- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1766
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001767- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1768
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001769- readline.clear_history was added.
1770
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001771- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1772
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001773- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1774
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001775- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1776
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001777- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1778
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001779- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1780
1781- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1782
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001783- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1784
1785- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1786
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001787- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1788 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1789 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1790
1791- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1792 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1793 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1794 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1795 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1796 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1797 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1798
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001799- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1800 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1801 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1802 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001803
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001804- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001805 iterators from a single iterable.
1806
1807- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1808 of raising a TypeError exception.
1809
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001810- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1811 as parameter.
1812
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001813Library
1814-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001815
Georg Brandlf0de6a12005-08-22 18:02:59 +00001816- Bug #1266283: The new function "lexists" is now in os.path.__all__.
1817
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001818- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1819 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1820 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001821
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001822- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1823 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1824 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001825
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001826- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001827
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001828- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1829 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001830
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001831- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1832 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1833
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001834- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1835
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001836- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001837 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001838
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001839- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001840 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001841
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001842- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1843
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001844- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1845 on cygwin and mingw32.
1846
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001847- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1848
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001849- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1850 module.
1851
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001852- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1853 installation scheme for all platforms.
1854
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001855- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001856 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001857
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001858- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1859 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1860 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1861
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001862- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1863 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1864 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1865
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001866- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1867
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001868- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1869
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001870- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1871 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1872
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001873- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1874 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1875 type pattern with the same value exists.
1876
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001877- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1878 when run from the command prompt).
1879
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001880- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1881 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1882
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001883- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1884 default sort).
1885
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001886- Added global runctx function to profile module
1887
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001888- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1889
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001890- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1891
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001892- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1893
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001894- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001895 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1896 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1897 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1898 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1899 accordingly.
1900
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001901- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1902 decoding standards.
1903
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001904- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1905 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1906 called for all requests.
1907
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001908- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1909 they are passed to the compiler.
1910
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001911- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1912 indent, width and depth.
1913
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001914- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1915 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1916
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001917- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1918 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1919
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001920- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1921
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001922- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1923
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001924- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1925
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001926- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1927 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1928
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001929- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001930 for better performance.
1931
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001932- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001933
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001934- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1935 a string).
1936
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001937- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1938
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001939- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1940
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001941- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1942
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001943- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1944
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001945- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1946 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1947 list of fieldnames.
1948
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001949- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1950 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1951
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001952- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1953
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001954- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1955 empty lists.
1956
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001957- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1958 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1959 and shelves.
1960
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001961- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1962 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1963
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001964- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001965 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1966 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001967
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001968- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1969 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001970 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001971
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001972- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001973 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1974 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1975
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001976- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1977 and removed in Py2.4.
1978
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001979- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1980
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001981- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1982
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001983Tools/Demos
1984-----------
1985
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001986- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1987 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1988
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001989- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1990
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001991- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1992 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1993 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1994 destination in situations where both files are given.
1995
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001996- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1997 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1998 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1999 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
2000
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00002001- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
2002
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00002003- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
2004 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
2005 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
2006 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
2007 now.
2008
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002009- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
2010 in effect
2011
2012- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
2013 C-c C-h
2014
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00002015- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
2016 -d option was given.
2017
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002018Build
2019-----
2020
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00002021- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
2022 build under OS X.
2023
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00002024- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
2025 --enable-profiling.
2026
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00002027- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
2028 is configured --with-tsc.
2029
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00002030- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
2031 on AMD64.
2032
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00002033- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
2034 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
2035
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00002036- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
2037 removed.
2038
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00002039- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
2040 supported (see PEP 11).
2041
2042- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
2043
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00002044- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
2045
2046- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
2047 (see PEP 11).
2048
2049- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
2050 sizeof(char) must be 1.
2051
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002052C API
2053-----
2054
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00002055- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
2056 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
2057 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
2058
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00002059- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
2060 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
2061 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
2062 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
2063
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00002064- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
2065 generator objects.
2066
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002067- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
2068 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00002069 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
2070 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002071
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00002072- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
2073 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
2074
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00002075- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
2076 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
2077 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
2078 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
2079 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
2080
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00002081- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
2082 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
2083 about 10% faster.
2084
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00002085- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
2086 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
2087
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00002088- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
2089 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
2090 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
2091 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
2092
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002093Windows
2094-------
2095
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00002096- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
2097 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
2098 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
2099 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
2100
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00002101- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
2102 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
2103 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
2104
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002105
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002106What's New in Python 2.3 final?
2107===============================
2108
2109*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
2110
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002111IDLE
2112----
2113
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00002114- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
2115 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
2116 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
2117 context-menu actions.
2118
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002119- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
2120 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
2121 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
2122 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
2123 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
2124 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
2125 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
2126 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
2127 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
2128
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002129
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002130What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
2131=============================================
2132
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00002133*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002134
2135Core and builtins
2136-----------------
2137
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002138- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002139 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002140 comment at the end are still unsupported.
2141
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002142Extension modules
2143-----------------
2144
2145- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
2146 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
2147 than once. This has been fixed.
2148
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002149- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2150 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2151 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2152 call.
2153
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002154- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2155
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002156Library
2157-------
2158
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002159- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2160 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2161
2162- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2163 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2164 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2165 restored.
2166
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002167IDLE
2168----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002169
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002170- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002171
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002172Build
2173-----
2174
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002175- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2176 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2177
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002178C API
2179-----
2180
2181Windows
2182-------
2183
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002184- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2185 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2186
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002187- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2188
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002189Mac
2190---
2191
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002192- Various fixes to pimp.
2193
2194- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2195
2196- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2197 more problems than it solves.
2198
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002199
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002200What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2201=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002202
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002203*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2204
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002205Core and builtins
2206-----------------
2207
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002208- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2209 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2210
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002211- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2212 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002213 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002214
2215- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2216 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2217 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002218 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002219
2220- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2221 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002222
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002223- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2224 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2225 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2226
2227- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002228 770247.
2229
2230- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002231
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002232Extension modules
2233-----------------
2234
2235- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2236 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2237
2238- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2239
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002240- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2241
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002242- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2243 contained within the _strptime module.
2244
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002245- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2246 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2247
2248- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002249 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2250
2251- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2252 the find_class attribute, if present.
2253
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002254- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002255
2256 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2257 (SF bug 763298).
2258
2259 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002260 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2261 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2262 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002263
2264 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2265
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002266Library
2267-------
2268
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002269- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2270
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002271- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2272 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2273 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2274 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2275 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2276 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2277 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2278 or Tester().
2279
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002280- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2281 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2282 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2283 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2284 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2285 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2286 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2287 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2288 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002289
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002290 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002291
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002292- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2293 weren't before was an oversight.
2294
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002295- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2296 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2297
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002298- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2299 when there are no lines.
2300
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002301- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2302 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2303
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002304- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2305 to child processes.
2306
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002307- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2308
2309- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2310
2311- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2312 xmlrpclib.
2313
2314- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2315 responses.
2316
2317- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2318 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2319
2320- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2321 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2322 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2323
2324- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2325 used as patterns.
2326
2327- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2328 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2329 than Tk 8.3.
2330
2331- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2332
2333- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002334
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002335Tools/Demos
2336-----------
2337
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002338- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2339
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002340- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2341
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002342- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002343
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002344Build
2345-----
2346
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002347- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2348
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002349- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2350
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002351- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2352 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002353
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002354- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2355 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2356 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002357
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002358C API
2359-----
2360
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002361- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2362 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2363
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002364Windows
2365-------
2366
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002367- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2368 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2369 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2370 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2371 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2372 Python exception ::
2373
2374 thread.error: can't start new thread
2375
2376 is raised now.
2377
2378- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2379 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2380 instead of from DLL teardown.
2381
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002382Mac
2383---
2384
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002385- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002386 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002387 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2388 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2389 the executable in the bundle.
2390
2391- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002392
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002393- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2394
2395- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2396 on Panther.
2397
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002398What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2399================================
2400
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002401*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002402
2403Core and builtins
2404-----------------
2405
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002406- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2407 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2408 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2409 with the -i option.
2410
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002411- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2412 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2413
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002414- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2415 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2416
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002417- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2418 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2419 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2420 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2421 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2422 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2423 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2424 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2425 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2426 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2427 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2428 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2429 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002430
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002431- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2432 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2433 embedded in a lambda expression.
2434
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002435- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2436 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2437 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2438 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2439 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2440
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002441- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2442 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2443 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2444
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002445- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2446 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2447
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002448- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2449 It's writable again.
2450
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002451- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2452 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2453 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002454 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002455
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002456- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2457 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2458 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2459
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002460Extension modules
2461-----------------
2462
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002463- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2464 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2465
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002466- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2467 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2468 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2469 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2470
2471- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2472 collection.
2473
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002474- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2475 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2476 unique within a single program run.
2477
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002478- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2479 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2480
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002481- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2482 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2483
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002484- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2485 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002486
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002487- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2488
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002489- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2490 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2491
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002492- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2493 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2494 for many BSD-derived systems.
2495
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002496
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002497Library
2498-------
2499
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002500- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2501 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2502 primary ones:
2503
2504 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2505 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2506 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2507
2508 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2509 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2510 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2511 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2512 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2513 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2514
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002515- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2516 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2517 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2518 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2519 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2520 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2521 argument.
2522
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002523- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2524 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2525 in the archive.
2526
2527- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2528 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2529
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002530- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2531 569574).
2532
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002533- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2534 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2535 no more.
2536
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002537- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2538 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2539 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2540 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2541 code coverage.
2542
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002543- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2544 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2545 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002546 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2547 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002548
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002549- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2550 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2551 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002552 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002553
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002554- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2555
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002556- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2557 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2558 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2559 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2560
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002561- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2562 handling.
2563
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002564- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2565 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2566
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002567- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2568 in socket.py.
2569
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002570- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2571
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002572- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2573 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2574 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2575 opener with proxy support.
2576
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002577- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2578
2579- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2580
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002581Tools/Demos
2582-----------
2583
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002584- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2585
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002586- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2587
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002588- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2589 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002590
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002591- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2592 files.
2593
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002594Build
2595-----
2596
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002597- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002598 different root directory.
2599
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002600C API
2601-----
2602
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002603- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2604 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2605 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2606 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2607 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2608 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2609 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2610 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2611 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2612 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2613
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002614- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2615 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2616 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2617 from Python.
2618
2619
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002620New platforms
2621-------------
2622
2623None this time.
2624
2625Tests
2626-----
2627
2628- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2629 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2630
2631Windows
2632-------
2633
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002634- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2635
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002636- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2637 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2638 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2639 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2640 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2641 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2642 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2643 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2644 that's what it's for.
2645
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002646Mac
2647---
2648
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002649- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2650 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2651 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2652 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002653- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2654 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2655- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002656
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002657SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2658------------------------------------
2659
2660430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2661598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2662622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2663661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2664683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2665697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2666713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2667724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2668727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2669729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2670730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2671731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2672732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2673733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2674735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2675740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2676744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2677745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2678747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2679749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2680751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2681753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2682755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2683757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2684760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2685
2686
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002687What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2688================================
2689
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002690*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002691
2692Core and builtins
2693-----------------
2694
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002695- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2696 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2697
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002698- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2699 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2700 and cannot be strings).
2701
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002702- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2703 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2704 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2705 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2706
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002707- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2708 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2709 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2710 Python itself.
2711
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002712- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2713 the referenced object, if it has one.
2714
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002715- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2716 the thread started at
2717 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2718
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002719- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2720 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2721 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2722 placed on a list index.
2723
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002724- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2725 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2726 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2727 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2728
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002729- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2730 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2731 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2732 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2733 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2734 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2735 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2736
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002737- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2738 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2739 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2740 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2741 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2742
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002743- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2744 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002745
2746- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2747 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2748 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2749 #693195.)
2750
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002751- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2752 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002753
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002754- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002755 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002756 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2757 interpreter executions, would fail.
2758
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002759- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002760 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002761 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002762
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002763Extension modules
2764-----------------
2765
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002766- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2767 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2768 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2769 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2770
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002771- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2772 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2773
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002774- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2775 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2776 and Greg Chapman.)
2777
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002778- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2779 recursively.
2780
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002781- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002782 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2783 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2784 leaks.
2785
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002786- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2787
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002788- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2789 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2790 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2791 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2792 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2793 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2794 #705836.
2795
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002796- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002797 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2798
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002799- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2800 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2801 See SF bug #692416.
2802
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002803- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2804 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2805
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002806- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2807 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2808 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002809
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002810- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002811 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2812 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2813
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002814- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2815 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2816 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2817 timeouts to work properly.
2818
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002819Library
2820-------
2821
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002822- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2823 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2824 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2825 future release.
2826
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002827- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2828 for querying platform dependent features.
2829
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002830- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002831
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002832- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2833 pickle protocol versions.
2834
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002835- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2836 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2837 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2838
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002839- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2840
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002841- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2842 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2843 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2844 modules.
2845
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002846- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2847 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2848 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2849
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002850- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2851 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2852
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002853- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2854 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2855 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2856
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002857- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002858 MS Office extensions.
2859
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002860- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2861 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2862
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002863- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2864 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2865
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002866- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2867 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2868 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2869 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2870 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2871 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2872
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002873- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2874 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2875 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002876
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002877- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2878 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2879 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2880
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002881- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2882
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002883- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2884 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2885 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2886
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002887Tools/Demos
2888-----------
2889
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002890- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2891 See the module docstring for details.
2892
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002893Build
2894-----
2895
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002896- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2897 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002898
2899C API
2900-----
2901
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002902- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2903
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002904- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2905 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2906 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2907
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002908- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2909 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002910
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002911 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2912 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2913 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002914
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002915- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002916 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2917
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002918- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2919 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2920 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002921
2922New platforms
2923-------------
2924
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002925None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002926
2927Tests
2928-----
2929
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002930- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2931 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002932
2933Windows
2934-------
2935
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002936- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2937 function.
2938
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002939- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2940 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002941
2942Mac
2943---
2944
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002945- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2946 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002947
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002948- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2949 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002950
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002951- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2952 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2953 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002954
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002955- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002956 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2957 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002958
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002959- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2960 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002961
2962
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002963What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2964=================================
2965
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002966*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002967
2968Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002969-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002970
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002971- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2972 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2973 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2974
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002975- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2976 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2977 (SF patch #664376.)
2978
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002979- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2980 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2981 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2982 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2983 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2984 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002985 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002986
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002987- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2988 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2989 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2990 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002991 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002992
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002993- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2994 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2995 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2996 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2997 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2998 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2999 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
3000 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
3001 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
3002 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
3003 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
3004
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00003005- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
3006 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
3007 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
3008 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
3009 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
3010 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
3011
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00003012- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
3013 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
3014
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00003015- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
3016 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
3017 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
3018 case.)
3019
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00003020- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
3021 passed as unicode strings.
3022
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00003023- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
3024 See SF bug #683467.
3025
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00003026- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
3027 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
3028
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00003029- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
3030
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00003031- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
3032
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00003033- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
3034 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
3035 arguments.
3036
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00003037- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
3038 See SF bug #667147.
3039
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003040- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003041 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003042 See SF bug #676155.
3043
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003044- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003045 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003046 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
3047 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
3048 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
3049 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
3050 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
3051 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003052
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003053Extension modules
3054-----------------
3055
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003056- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
3057 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3058 tp_as_number pointer.
3059
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003060- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
3061 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
3062 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
3063 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
3064 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
3065
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003066- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
3067
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00003068- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
3069
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003070- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00003071 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003072 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
3073 patch #678531.)
3074
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00003075- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
3076 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
3077
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00003078- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
3079 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
3080
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00003081- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
3082
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00003083- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
3084 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
3085 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
3086
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003087- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
3088
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003089- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
3090 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
3091
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003092- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003093
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003094- datetime changes:
3095
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00003096 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
3097
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003098 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
3099 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
3100 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
3101 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
3102 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
3103 now.
3104
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003105 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003106 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
3107 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003108
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003109 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003110 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003111 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
3112 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
3113 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
3114 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003115
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003116 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
3117 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
3118 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003119 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
3120
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003121 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
3122 by a later example coded by Guido.
3123
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003124 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003125 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
3126 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
3127 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003128 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
3129 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
3130
3131 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
3132 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
3133 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
3134 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
3135 tzinfo subclass instance.
3136
3137 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
3138 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
3139 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
3140 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
3141 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
3142 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
3143 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
3144 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003145
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003146 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
3147 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3148 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3149 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3150 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003151 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3152
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003153 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003154
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003155 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3156 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3157 as a naive datetime object.
3158
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003159 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3160 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3161 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3162
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003163 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3164 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3165 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3166 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3167 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3168 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3169 comparison.
3170
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003171 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3172 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3173 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3174 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003175 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003176
3177 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003178
3179 and ::
3180
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003181 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3182
3183 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3184 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3185 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3186 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3187
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003188 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3189 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3190 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3191 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3192 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3193
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003194 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3195 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003196 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3197 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003198
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003199Library
3200-------
3201
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003202- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3203 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3204
3205- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3206 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3207 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3208 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3209 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3210 See PEP 307 for details.
3211
3212- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3213 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3214
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003215- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3216 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003217 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003218 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3219 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003220 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003221
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003222- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3223 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3224
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003225- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3226 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3227 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3228
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003229- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3230
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003231- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3232 exception.
3233
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003234- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3235 class.
3236
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003237- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3238 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3239 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3240
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003241- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3242 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3243
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003244- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003245 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3246 See SF bug #659228.
3247
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003248- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3249 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3250 See SF patch #651082.
3251
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003252- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003253
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003254- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3255 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3256
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003257- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003258 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003259
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003260- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3261 DOS paths from other platforms.
3262
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003263Tools/Demos
3264-----------
3265
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003266- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3267 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3268 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3269 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3270 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3271 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3272 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3273 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3274 example:
3275
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003276 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3277 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003278
3279 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3280
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003281
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003282Build
3283-----
3284
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003285- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3286 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3287 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003288 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3289
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003290 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3291
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003292- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3293 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3294 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3295 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3296 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3297 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3298 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3299 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3300 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3301
3302- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3303 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3304 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3305 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3306
3307- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3308 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3309
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003310C API
3311-----
3312
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003313- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3314 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003315
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003316- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3317 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3318 tp_as_number pointer.
3319
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003320- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3321 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3322 (SF #681367)
3323
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003324- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3325 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3326 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3327 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003328
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003329Tests
3330-----
3331
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003332- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003333 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3334 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3335 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3336 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3337 pydoc.)
3338
3339- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3340
3341- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003342
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003343Windows
3344-------
3345
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003346- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3347 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3348 time).
3349
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003350- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3351 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3352
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003353- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3354 release without strong cryptography.
3355
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003356- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003357 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003358
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003359- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3360 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3361
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003362Mac
3363---
3364
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003365- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3366 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003367
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003368- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3369 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3370 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003371
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003372- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3373 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003374
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003375- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3376 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3377 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3378 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003379
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003380- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003381 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3382 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3383 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003384
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003385
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003386What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003387=================================
3388
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003389*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003390
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003391Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003392--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003393
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003394- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3395
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003396- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3397 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003398 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003399 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003400 a different meaning than before.
3401
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003402- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003403 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003404 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003405
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003406- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003407 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003408 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003409
3410- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3411 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3412 and deallocation.
3413
3414- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3415 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3416
3417- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3418 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3419 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3420 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3421 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3422
3423- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3424 now detected by the garbage collector.
3425
3426- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3427 [SF bug 519621]
3428
3429- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3430 identifier.
3431
3432- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3433 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3434 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3435 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3436 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3437 [SF bug 563060]
3438
3439- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3440 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3441 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3442 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3443 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3444
3445- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3446 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3447 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3448
3449- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3450
3451- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3452 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3453 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3454 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3455 state of the slots would be lost.)
3456
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003457Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003458-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003459
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003460- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003461 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3462 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3463 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3464 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003465 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3466 Jython 2.1.
3467
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003468- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003469 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003470 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3471 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3472 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3473 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3474 these, see PEP 302.
3475
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003476- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3477 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3478 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3479
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003480- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3481 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3482 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3483
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003484- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3485 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3486 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3487
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003488- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3489 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3490 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3491 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3492 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3493 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3494 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3495 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3496 releases or implementations.
3497
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003498- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003499 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3500 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003501
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003502- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3503 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3504
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003505- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3506 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3507 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3508
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003509- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3510 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3511
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003512- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3513 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003514 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3515 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003516
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003517- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3518 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3519 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3520 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3521 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3522
3523 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3524 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3525 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3526 pattern.
3527
3528 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3529 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3530 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3531 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3532
3533 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3534 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3535 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3536 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3537 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3538 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3539
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003540- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3541 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3542 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3543 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3544 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3545 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3546 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3547 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003548
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003549- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3550 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3551 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3552 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3553 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003554 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3555 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3556 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3557 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3558 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3559 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3560 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003561
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003562- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3563 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3564
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003565- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3566 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3567 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3568 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3569 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3570 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3571 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3572 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3573 to Zack Weinberg!
3574
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003575- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3576 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3577 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3578 type. This has been fixed now.
3579
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003580- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3581 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3582 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3583
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003584- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3585 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3586 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3587 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3588 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3589 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3590 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3591 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003592 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003593
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003594- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3595 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3596 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003597
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003598- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3599 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3600 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3601 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3602 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3603 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3604 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3605 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003606 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003607 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3608 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3609
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003610- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3611 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3612 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3613 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3614 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3615 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3616 this.)
3617
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003618- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3619 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003620 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003621 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003622 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3623 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003624 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3625 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003626
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003627- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3628 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3629 currently running.
3630
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003631- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3632 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3633 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3634 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3635
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003636- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3637 as directory names.
3638
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003639- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3640 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3641
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003642- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3643 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3644
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003645- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003646 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3647 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003648
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003649- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3650 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3651 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3652 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3653 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3654
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003655- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3656 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3657 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3658 removed.
3659
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003660- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3661 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3662 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3663
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003664- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3665 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3666 to __debug__.
3667
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003668- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3669 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3670 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3671
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003672- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3673 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3674 deprecated now.
3675
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003676- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3677 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3678 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003679
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003680- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3681 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3682 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3683 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3684 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003685
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003686- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3687 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3688
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003689- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3690 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3691 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003692 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003693 is backward compatible.
3694
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003695- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3696 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3697 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3698 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3699 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3700
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003701- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3702 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3703 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3704 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3705 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3706 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003707
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003708- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3709 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3710
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003711- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3712 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3713
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003714- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3715 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3716 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3717 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3718 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3719
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003720- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3721 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3722 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3723
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003724- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003725 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3726
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003727- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3728 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3729 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003730
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003731- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3732 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3733
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003734- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3735 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3736 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3737
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003738- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3739
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003740Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003741-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003742
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003743- Added three operators to the operator module:
3744 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3745 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3746 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3747
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003748- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3749
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003750- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3751 archives.
3752
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003753- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3754 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3755 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3756
3757 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3758
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003759- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3760 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3761 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003762 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003763
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003764- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3765 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3766 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3767 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003768 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3769 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3770 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3771 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003772
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003773- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3774 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003775
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003776- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3777
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003778- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3779 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3780
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003781- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3782 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3783 supported.
3784
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003785- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3786
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003787- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3788 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003789
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003790- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3791 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3792
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003793- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3794
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003795- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3796 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3797
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003798- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3799 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3800 functions but callable type objects.
3801
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003802- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003803 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003804 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003805
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003806- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3807 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003808
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003809- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3810 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003811
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003812- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3813 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3814 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3815 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3816
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003817- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3818 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003819
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003820- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3821 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3822 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3823 and __imul__.
3824
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003825- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003826 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3827 is called.
3828
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003829- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3830 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3831 interpreter was compiled.
3832
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003833- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3834 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3835 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003836 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003837 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3838 1, not 2.
3839
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003840- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3841 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3842 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3843 limit.
3844
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003845- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3846 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3847 bug #623464.
3848
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003849- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3850 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3851 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3852 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3853
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003854Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003855-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003856
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003857- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3858
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003859- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3860 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3861 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3862 with Python 2.3a2.
3863
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003864- os.path exposes getctime.
3865
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003866- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003867 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003868 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003869 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003870 unit tests of floating point results.
3871
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003872- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3873 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3874 has been increased.
3875
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003876- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3877 executed.
3878
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003879- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3880 postinstallation script.
3881
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003882- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3883 test the current module.
3884
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003885- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003886 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3887 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3888 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3889 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3890
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003891- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003892 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003893 Ward's Optik package.
3894
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003895- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3896 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3897 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3898 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3899
3900- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3901 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003902 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003903
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003904- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3905 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3906 shelf are binary pickles.
3907
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003908- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3909 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3910
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003911- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3912 modules are iterators now.
3913
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003914- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3915 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3916 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3917 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3918 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3919 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003920
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003921- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3922 with their entity value.
3923
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003924- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3925
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003926- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3927 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003928
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003929- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3930 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003931 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003932
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003933- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3934 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3935 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3936 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3937 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3938 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3939 main():
3940
3941 import locale
3942 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3943
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003944- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3945 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3946
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003947- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3948 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3949 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3950 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3951 to the new standard.
3952
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003953- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3954 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3955 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3956 an extension to the database.
3957
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003958- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3959 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3960 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3961 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003962 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003963
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003964- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003965 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003966
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003967- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3968 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3969 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3970 bounded integers.
3971
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003972- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3973 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3974 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3975 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3976 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3977 in existence.
3978
3979 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3980 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3981 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3982 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3983 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3984 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3985
3986 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3987 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3988 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3989 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3990
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003991- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3992 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3993 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3994
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003995- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3996
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003997- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3998 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3999 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
4000 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
4001
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00004002- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
4003 argument.
4004
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00004005- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
4006 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
4007 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
4008 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
4009 [SF patch 560794].
4010
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004011- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
4012 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
4013 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00004014 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
4015 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
4016 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004017
4018- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
4019 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00004020
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00004021- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
4022 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
4023 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
4024 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00004025
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00004026- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
4027 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
4028 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
4029 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
4030 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
4031
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004032- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00004033
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00004034- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
4035
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00004036- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
4037 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
4038 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
4039 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
4040 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
4041 identical to None.
4042
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00004043- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
4044 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
4045 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
4046 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
4047 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
4048 results now.
4049
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00004050- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
4051 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
4052
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004053- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
4054 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
4055 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
4056 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
4057 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
4058 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
4059 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
4060 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
4061
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00004062- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
4063
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00004064- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
4065 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
4066
4067- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
4068 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
4069 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
4070 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
4071 and other systems.
4072
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004073- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
4074 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
4075 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
4076 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 +00004077 work well with these.
4078
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00004079- compileall now supports quiet operation.
4080
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004081- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00004082 connections.
4083
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00004084- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
4085 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
4086 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
4087
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00004088- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
4089 sets
4090
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00004091- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
4092 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
4093 name.
4094
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00004095- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
4096 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
4097 passed in.
4098
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004099- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00004100 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00004101 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
4102 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00004103
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00004104- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
4105
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00004106- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
4107
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00004108- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
4109 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
4110 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
4111
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004112- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
4113 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
4114 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
4115 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00004116 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004117
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004118- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004119 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004120 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004121
4122- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
4123 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
4124 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
4125
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004126- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00004127 the value of its expression argument.
4128
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004129- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
4130 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
4131 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
4132
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00004133- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
4134 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
4135 skipstone browser was included.
4136
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00004137- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
4138 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
4139
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004140Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004141-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004142
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00004143- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
4144 names in addition to accepting file names.
4145
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00004146- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
4147 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4148 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4149 still used and useful.)
4150
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004151- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4152 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4153 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4154 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004155
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004156- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4157 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4158 the generated binary.
4159
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004160Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004161-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004162
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004163- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4164
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004165- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4166 except in the hands of experts.
4167
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004168- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004169 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4170 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4171 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004172
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004173- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4174 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4175 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4176 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4177 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4178 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4179 builds.
4180
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004181- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4182 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4183 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4184 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4185 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4186 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4187 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4188 new type.
4189
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004190- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004191
4192 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4193 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4194 positive infinities.
4195
4196 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4197 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4198 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4199 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4200 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4201 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4202 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4203
4204 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4205
4206 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4207
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004208- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4209 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4210 size of the executable.
4211
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004212- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4213 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4214 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4215 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004216
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004217- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4218
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004219- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4220 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4221 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004222
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004223- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4224 well as Unix.
4225
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004226- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4227 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4228 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4229 modules in the README file for details.
4230
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004231C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004232-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004233
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004234- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4235 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004236 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004237 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004238 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004239
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004240- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4241 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4242 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4243 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4244 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4245 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004246 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004247 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4248 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4249 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4250 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4251 aligned.)
4252
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004253- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4254 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4255 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4256
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004257- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4258 level.
4259
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004260- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4261 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4262 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4263 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4264 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4265
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004266- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4267 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4268 code.
4269
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004270- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4271 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4272 adjusting for negative indices.
4273
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004274- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4275 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4276 object.
4277
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004278- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4279 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4280 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4281
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004282- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4283 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004284
4285- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4286
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004287- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4288 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4289 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4290 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4291
4292- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4293
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004294- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004295
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004296- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004297 without going through the buffer API.
4298
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004299- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004300
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004301- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4302 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4303 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4304 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4305
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004306- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4307 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4308
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004309- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004310 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4311
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004312New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004313-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004314
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004315- OpenVMS is now supported.
4316
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004317- AtheOS is now supported.
4318
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004319- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4320
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004321- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4322
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004323Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004324-----
4325
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004326- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4327 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4328 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004329
4330Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004331-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004332
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004333- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4334 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4335 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4336 bugs.
4337 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004338 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004339 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4340 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004341 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004342
4343- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004344 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004345
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004346- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4347 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4348
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004349- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4350 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004351 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004352 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4353
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004354- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4355 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4356 use files" uninstall option).
4357
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004358- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4359
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004360- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4361 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4362
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004363- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4364 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4365 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4366
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004367- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4368 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4369 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4370 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4371 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004372 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4373 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4374 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004375
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004376- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004377 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004378 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4379 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4380 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4381 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4382 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4383 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4384 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4385 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4386 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4387 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4388 work around.
4389
4390- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4391 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4392 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4393 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4394 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4395 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4396 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4397 specified with O_CREAT too).
4398
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004399Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004400----
4401
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004402- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004403
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004404- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4405 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4406 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4407
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004408- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4409 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4410 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4411
4412- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4413 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4414 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4415 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4416 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4417 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4418 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4419 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004420
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004421- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4422 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4423 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004424
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004425- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4426 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4427 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4428 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4429 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004430
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004431- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4432 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4433 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004434
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004435- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4436 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004437
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004438- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4439 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4440 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4441 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4442 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004443
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004444- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4445 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4446 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4447
4448- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4449 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4450 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004451
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004452- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4453 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4454 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4455 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004456 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004457
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004458- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4459 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004460
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004461- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4462 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004463
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004464- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004465 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004466 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4467 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004468
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004469
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004470What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004471===============================
4472
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004473*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4474
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004475Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004476--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004477
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004478- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4479 with a custom metaclass.
4480
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004481Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004482-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004483
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004484- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4485 are proxies.
4486
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004487Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004488-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004489
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004490- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4491 very short strings.
4492
4493- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4494 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4495 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4496 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4497 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4498
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004499Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004500-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004501
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004502- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4503 close or delete time).
4504
4505- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4506 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4507
4508- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4509
4510- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004511 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004512
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004513Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004514-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004515
4516Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004517-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004518
4519C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004520-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004521
4522New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004523-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004524
4525Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004526-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004527
4528Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004529-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004530
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004531- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4532
4533- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4534 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4535
4536- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4537 deleted at process exit time.
4538
4539- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4540 in backslash.
4541
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004542Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004543----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004544
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004545- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4546 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4547 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4548
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004549
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004550What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004551===========================
4552
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004553*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4554
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004555Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004556--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004557
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004558- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4559 been extensively updated. See
4560
4561 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4562
4563 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4564
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004565- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4566 deleted!
4567
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004568- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4569 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4570 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4571 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4572 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4573
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004574- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4575
4576 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4577 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4578
4579 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4580 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4581 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4582 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4583 supported anyway.
4584
4585 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4586 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4587
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004588- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4589 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4590 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4591 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4592 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004593
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004594- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4595 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4596 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4597
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004598Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004599-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004600
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004601- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4602 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4603 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4604 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4605 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4606 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004607 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4608 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4609 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4610 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004611
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004612- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4613 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4614 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4615
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004616Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004617-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004618
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004619- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4620
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004621Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004622-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004623
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004624- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4625 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4626 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4627 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4628 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4629 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4630
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004631- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4632
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004633- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4634
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004635- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4636
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004637- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4638 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4639 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4640
4641- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4642
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004643Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004644-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004645
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004646- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4647 off a search on Google.
4648
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004649Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004650-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004651
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004652- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4653 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4654 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4655 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4656 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4657 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4658 other platforms should do likewise.
4659
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004660- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4661 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4662 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4663
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004664C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004665-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004666
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004667- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4668 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4669 producing key-value pairs.
4670
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004671- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004672 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004673 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4674 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4675 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4676 previously went unchallenged.
4677
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004678New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004679-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004680
4681Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004682-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004683
4684Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004685-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004686
4687Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004688----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004689
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004690- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4691 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004692
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004693- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4694 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4695 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4696 home.
4697
4698
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004699What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004700===========================
4701
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004702*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4703
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004704Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004705--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004706
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004707- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4708 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004709
4710 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004711 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004712
4713 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4714 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004715 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004716 This needs to be documented.
4717
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004718- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4719 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4720
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004721- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4722 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4723 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4724
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004725- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4726 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4727
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004728- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4729 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4730 class forbids it).
4731
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004732- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4733 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4734 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4735
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004736- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4737
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004738Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004739-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004740
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004741- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4742 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004743 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004744
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004745- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4746 (like 1 + '').
4747
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004748Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004749-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004750
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004751- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4752 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4753 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4754 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004755 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004756 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4757
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004758- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4759 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4760 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4761 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4762
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004763- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4764 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004765 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4766 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4767 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004768
4769- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4770 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004771
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004772- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4773 bytes on its input.
4774
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004775Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004776-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004777
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004778- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004779 convenience function.
4780
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004781- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4782 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4783 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004784 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4785 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4786 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4787 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4788 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4789 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004790
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004791- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4792 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4793 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4794 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4795
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004796- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4797 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4798 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4799
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004800- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4801 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4802 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4803 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4804
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004805- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4806 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004807 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004808 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4809 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4810 new -l and -e options.
4811
4812- statcache is now deprecated.
4813
4814- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4815 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004816 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004817 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4818 time properly taken into account.
4819
4820- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4821 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4822 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4823 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4824
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004825Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004826-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004827
4828Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004829-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004830
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004831- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4832 is built with libdb3 if available.
4833
4834- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4835
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004836C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004837-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004838
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004839- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4840 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4841 PySequence_Size().
4842
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004843- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4844
4845- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4846 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4847 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4848
4849- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4850 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4851
4852- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4853 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4854
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004855New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004856-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004857
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004858- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4859 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4860
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004861- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4862 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4863
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004864- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4865
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004866Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004867-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004868
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004869- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4870 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4871
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004872Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004873-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004874
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004875Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004876----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004877
4878- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4879 removed completely in the next release.
4880
4881- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4882 OSX.
4883
4884- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4885 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4886
4887- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4888
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004889
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004890What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004891===========================
4892
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004893*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4894
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004895Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004896--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004897
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004898- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004899 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004900 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004901 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4902 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004903 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4904 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004905 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4906 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004907
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004908- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4909 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4910
4911- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4912 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4913
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004914Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004915-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004916
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004917- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4918 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4919 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4920 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4921 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4922 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4923 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4924 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4925
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004926- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4927 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4928 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4929 example).
4930
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004931- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004932 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004933 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004934 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004935
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004936- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4937 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4938 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004939 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004940
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004941- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4942 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4943 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4944 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4945 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4946 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4947
4948 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4949
4950 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4951
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004952Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004953-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004954
4955- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4956
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004957- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4958
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004959- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4960 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004961
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004962- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4963 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4964 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4965 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4966 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4967 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004968 attributes.
4969
4970- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4971 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4972 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004973
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004974- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4975 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4976 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004977
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004978- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4979 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4980 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004981 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4982 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4983
4984- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4985 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004986
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004987Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004988-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004989
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004990- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4991 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4992
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004993- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4994 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4995 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4996 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4997
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004998- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4999 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
5000 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
5001 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
5002
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00005003 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
5004 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
5005 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
5006 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
5007 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
5008 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
5009 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
5010 without losing information).
5011
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005012- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005013 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
5014 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
5015 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
5016 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
5017 module).
5018
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00005019 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005020 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
5021 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
5022 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
5023 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005024
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005025- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00005026 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
5027 encoding.
5028
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00005029- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
5030 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
5031
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005032- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005033 to allow saving the message body to a file.
5034
5035- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
5036 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
5037 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
5038 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
5039
5040- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
5041
5042- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
5043 ON, and OFF.
5044
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005045- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
5046 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
5047
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005048Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005049-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005050
5051- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
5052 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
5053 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005054
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005055- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
5056 been added: -X and -E.
5057
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005058Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005059-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005060
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005061- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
5062 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
5063
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005064C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005065-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005066
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00005067- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
5068 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
5069 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
5070 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
5071 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
5072
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00005073- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
5074 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
5075 as long) arguments.
5076
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005077- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
5078 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
5079 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
5080 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
5081 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
5082 report any bugs or strange behavior).
5083
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005084- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
5085 input.
5086
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005087New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005088-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005089
5090Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005091-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005092
5093Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005094-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005095
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00005096- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
5097 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
5098 is created for .py and .pyw files.
5099
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005100- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
5101 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
5102 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005103 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005104
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005105 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
5106 # (SIGINT) behavior.
5107 import signal
5108 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005109
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005110 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005111 while 1:
5112 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005113 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005114 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
5115 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
5116 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
5117 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005118
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005119
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005120What's New in Python 2.2a4?
5121===========================
5122
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005123*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
5124
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005125Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005126--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005127
5128- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
5129 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
5130 documentation for all operations on list objects.
5131
5132- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
5133 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
5134 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
5135 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
5136 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
5137 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
5138 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005139
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005140- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005141 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005142 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
5143 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
5144 associate a docstring with a property.
5145
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005146- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
5147 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5148 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5149 other built-in object types.
5150
5151- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5152 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5153 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5154 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5155 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5156
5157- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5158 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5159
5160- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5161 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005162 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005163 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5164 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5165 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5166 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5167 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5168
5169- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5170 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5171 class.
5172
5173- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5174 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5175 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5176 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5177
5178- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5179 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5180 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5181 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5182
5183- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5184 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5185
5186- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5187 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5188 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5189 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5190 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005191 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005192 with the same value as s.
5193
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005194- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5195
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005196Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005197----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005198
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005199- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5200
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005201- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5202 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5203 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5204 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5205 objects.
5206
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005207- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5208 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005209 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5210 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5211
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005212- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5213 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5214 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5215
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005216Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005217-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005218
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005219- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5220 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5221 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5222 by the instances.
5223
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005224- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5225 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5226 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5227
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005228- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5229 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5230 before the entire comparison is complete.
5231
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005232- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5233 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5234 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5235
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005236- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5237 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5238 getwriter().
5239
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005240- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5241 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5242
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005243- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005244 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5245 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5246
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005247- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5248 iterable object.
5249
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005250- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5251 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005252
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005253- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5254 authentication.
5255
5256- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5257 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005258
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005259- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005260 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5261 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5262 a sample driver.)
5263
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005264Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005265-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005266
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005267- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5268 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5269 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5270 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5271 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5272 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5273 kernel has large file support.
5274
5275- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5276 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5277 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5278 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5279 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5280
5281- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5282 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5283 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5284
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005285C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005286-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005287
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005288- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5289 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5290
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005291New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005292-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005293
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005294- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5295 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5296
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005297Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005298-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005299
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005300- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5301 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5302 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5303 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5304 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5305
5306- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5307 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5308 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5309 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5310
5311- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5312 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5313
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005314Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005315-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005316
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005317- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005318 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5319 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005320
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005321
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005322What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5323===========================
5324
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005325*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5326
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005327Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005328----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005329
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005330- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5331 big to represent as a C double.
5332
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005333- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5334 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5335 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5336 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5337 restriction).
5338
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005339- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5340 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5341 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5342 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5343 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5344
5345 >>> dir([])
5346 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5347 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5348 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5349 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5350 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5351 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5352 'reverse', 'sort']
5353
5354 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5355
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005356- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005357 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5358 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5359 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5360 OverflowError exception.
5361
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005362- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005363 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005364 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5365 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5366 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5367 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5368 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005369 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005370 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5371 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5372
5373 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5374 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5375 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5376 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005377
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005378- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005379 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5380 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5381 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5382 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5383 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5384 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5385 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5386 once it is created.
5387
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005388- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5389 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5390 (key, value) pairs.
5391
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005392- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005393 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5394 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5395
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005396- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5397 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5398 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5399 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5400 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005401
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005402- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005403 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5404 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5405
5406 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5407
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005408- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005409 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5410
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005411Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005412-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005413
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005414- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005415 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5416 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005417
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005418- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5419 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5420 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5421 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5422 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5423 in this area anymore).
5424
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005425- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5426 threading.Timer.
5427
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005428- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5429 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5430
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005431- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005432 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5433
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005434- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005435 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5436 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5437 converted to Python longs.
5438
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005439- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005440 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5441
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005442- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5443 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5444 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5445
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005446Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005447-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005448
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005449- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5450 division operators as per PEP 238.
5451
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005452Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005453-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005454
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005455- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5456 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5457 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5458 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5459
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005460C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005461-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005462
5463- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005464
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005465- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5466 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005467 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005468
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005469 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5470 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005471 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005472 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005473
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005474- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005475 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5476 module:
5477
5478 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005479
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005480 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5481 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005482
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005483 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5484 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005485
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005486 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5487
5488 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5489
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005490- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005491 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5492 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5493 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005494
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005495New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005496-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005497
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005498- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5499 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5500 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5501 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5502 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005503
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005504Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005505-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005506
5507Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005508-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005509
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005510- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5511 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5512 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5513 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005514 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5515 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5516 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5517 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5518 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005519
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005520- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005521 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5522
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005523
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005524What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5525===========================
5526
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005527*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5528
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005529Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005530-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005531
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005532- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5533 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5534
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005535- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5536 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5537 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005538
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005539- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5540 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5541 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5542 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005543
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005544- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5545
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005546- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005547
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005548Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005549-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005550
5551- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005552 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005553 the module docstring for details.
5554
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005555Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005556-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005557
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005558- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005559 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5560 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5561 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005562
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005563- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5564 Nick Mathewson.
5565
5566Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005567----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005568
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005569- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5570 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5571 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5572 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5573 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5574 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5575 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5576 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5577
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005578- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5579 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5580 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5581 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5582
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005583- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5584 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5585 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5586 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5587 come a long way).
5588
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005589- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5590 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5591 write filters for these warnings).
5592
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005593- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5594 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5595 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5596 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5597 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5598
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005599- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5600 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5601 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5602 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5603 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5604 older distribution.
5605
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005606Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005607-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005608
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005609- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5610 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005611 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005612
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005613- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5614 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5615 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5616
5617- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5618
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005619- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5620
5621- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5622
5623- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5624
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005625- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005626
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005627- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5628
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005629New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005630-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005631
5632C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005633-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005634
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005635- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5636 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5637 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5638 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5639 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5640 against buffer overruns.
5641
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005642- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005643 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5644 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005645 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5646 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5647 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5648
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005649- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5650 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5651 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5652 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5653 deprecated.
5654
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005655Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005656-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005657
5658- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5659 relevant is found.
5660
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005661
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005662What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005663===========================
5664
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005665*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5666
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005667Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005668----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005669
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005670- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5671 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5672 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5673 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5674 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5675 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5676 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5677 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005678 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005679 repaired.
5680
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005681- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005682 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005683 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5684 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5685 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5686 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5687 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5688 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5689 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5690 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5691
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005692- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5693 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5694 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5695 leading BMO character).
5696
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005697- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5698 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5699 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5700
5701 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5702 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5703 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005704
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005705 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5706 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5707 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5708 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5709 for various simple to use conversions.
5710
5711 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5712 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5713
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005714 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5715 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5716 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5717 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5718 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5719 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5720 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5721 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5722 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5723 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5724 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5725 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5726 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5727 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5728 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005729
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005730- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5731 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5732 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005733 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005734 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005735
5736 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005737 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5738 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5739 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5740 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5741 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005742 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5743 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005744
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005745 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5746 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5747 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005748 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005749
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005750- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5751 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5752 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5753 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5754 floating arithmetic,
5755
5756 x = 9007199254740992.0
5757 print long(x)
5758
5759 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5760 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5761 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5762 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5763 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5764 functions are of good quality).
5765
5766 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5767 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5768 algorithms to break.
5769
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005770- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5771 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5772 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5773 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5774 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5775 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5776 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5777 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5778 order.
5779
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005780- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5781 operation along the most common code paths.
5782
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005783- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5784 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5785
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005786- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5787 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5788 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5789 {}.update(UserDict())
5790
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005791- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5792 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5793 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5794 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5795 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5796 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5797 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5798 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5799
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005800- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005801 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005802
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005803 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005804 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5805 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005806 join() method of strings
5807 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005808 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5809 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005810 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005811 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005812
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005813- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5814 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5815
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005816- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5817 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5818
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005819- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5820 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5821 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5822 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5823
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005824- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5825 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005826 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005827 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5828 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005829
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005830- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5831
5832
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005833Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005834-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005835
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005836- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005837 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005838 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5839 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5840
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005841- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5842 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5843
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005844- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5845 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5846 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5847 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5848
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005849- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5850 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5851 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5852
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005853- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5854
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005855- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5856
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005857- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5858 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5859 that are still imported into string.py).
5860
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005861- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5862
5863- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5864 Now it does.
5865
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005866- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5867
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005868- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5869 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5870 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5871 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5872 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005873 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5874 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005875
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005876- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5877 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5878 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5879 'help(object)'.
5880
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005881Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005882-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005883
5884- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005885 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005886 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5887 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5888
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005889- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005890 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5891 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005892
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005893C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005894-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005895
5896- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5897 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005898
5899----
5900
5901**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**