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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
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
Guido van Rossum1968ad32006-02-25 22:38:04 +000015- Patch 1433928:
16 - The copy module now "copies" function objects (as atomic objects).
17 - dict.__getitem__ now looks for a __missing__ hook before raising
18 KeyError.
19
Marc-André Lemburgfe4b34c2006-02-19 15:22:22 +000020- Fix the encodings package codec search function to only search
21 inside its own package. Fixes problem reported in patch #1433198.
22
23 Note: Codec packages should implement and register their own
24 codec search function. PEP 100 has the details.
25
Martin v. Löwis18e16552006-02-15 17:27:45 +000026- PEP 353: Using ssize_t as the index type.
27
Neal Norwitzfc76d632006-01-10 06:03:13 +000028- Patch #1400181, fix unicode string formatting to not use the locale.
29 This is how string objects work. u'%f' could use , instead of .
30 for the decimal point. Now both strings and unicode always use periods.
31
Neal Norwitz671b9e32006-01-09 07:07:12 +000032- Bug #1244610, #1392915, fix build problem on OpenBSD 3.7 and 3.8.
33 configure would break checking curses.h.
34
Georg Brandlcd4d1e82005-12-27 17:37:07 +000035- Bug #959576: The pwd module is now builtin. This allows Python to be
36 built on UNIX platforms without $HOME set.
37
Neal Norwitzc10978f2005-12-19 06:07:16 +000038- Bug #1072182, fix some potential problems if characters are signed.
39
Neal Norwitz5d0ad502005-12-19 04:27:42 +000040- Bug #889500, fix line number on SyntaxWarning for global declarations.
41
Neal Norwitzdb83eb32005-12-18 05:29:30 +000042- Bug #1378022, UTF-8 files with a leading BOM crashed the interpreter.
43
Neal Norwitze7214a12005-12-18 05:03:17 +000044- Support for converting hex strings to floats no longer works.
45 This was not portable. float('0x3') now raises a ValueError.
46
Barry Warsaw2a38a862005-12-18 01:27:35 +000047- Patch #1382163: Expose Subversion revision number to Python. New C API
48 function Py_GetBuildNumber(). New attribute sys.build_number. Build number
49 is now displayed in interactive prompt banner.
50
Georg Brandlfa166682005-12-17 21:45:17 +000051- Implementation of PEP 341 - Unification of try/except and try/finally.
52 "except" clauses can now be written together with a "finally" clause in
Neal Norwitz11ca77e2005-12-17 22:24:12 +000053 one try statement instead of two nested ones. Patch #1355913.
Georg Brandlfa166682005-12-17 21:45:17 +000054
Hye-Shik Chang835b2432005-12-17 04:38:31 +000055- Bug #1379994: Builtin unicode_escape and raw_unicode_escape codec
56 now encodes backslash correctly.
57
Martin v. Löwisb45b3152005-11-28 17:34:23 +000058- Patch #1350409: Work around signal handling bug in Visual Studio 2005.
59
Georg Brandlf06e30a2005-11-24 15:37:42 +000060- Bug #1281408: Py_BuildValue now works correct even with unsigned longs
61 and long longs.
62
Neal Norwitz67715f02005-11-09 06:59:35 +000063- SF Bug #1350188, "setdlopenflags" leads to crash upon "import"
64 It was possible dlerror() returns a NULL pointer, use a default error
65 message in this case.
66
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +000067- Replaced most Unicode charmap codecs with new ones using the
68 new Unicode translate string feature in the builtin charmap
69 codec; the codecs were created from the mapping tables available
70 at ftp.unicode.org and contain a few updates (e.g. the Mac OS
71 encodings now include a mapping for the Apple logo)
72
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +000073- Added a few more codecs for Mac OS encodings
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +000074
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +000075- Speed up some Unicode operations.
76
77- A new AST parser implementation was completed.
78
Neal Norwitzb6570f52005-10-21 06:26:10 +000079- SF bug #1167751: fix incorrect code being for generator expressions.
Neal Norwitz16af7342005-10-21 06:25:33 +000080 The following code now raises a SyntaxError: foo(a = i for i in range(10))
81
Neal Norwitz708e51a2005-10-03 04:48:15 +000082- SF Bug #976608: fix SystemError when mtime of an imported file is -1.
83
Neal Norwitz11bd1192005-10-03 00:54:56 +000084- SF Bug #887946: fix segfault when redirecting stdin from a directory.
85 Provide a warning when a directory is passed on the command line.
86
Neal Norwitz40d37812005-10-02 01:48:49 +000087- Fix segfault with invalid coding.
88
89- SF bug #772896: unknown encoding results in MemoryError.
90
Raymond Hettinger6b27cda2005-09-24 21:23:05 +000091- All iterators now have a Boolean value of true. Formerly, some iterators
92 supported a __len__() method which evaluated to False when the iterator
93 was empty.
94
Guido van Rossum630db602005-09-20 18:49:54 +000095- On 64-bit platforms, when __len__() returns a value that cannot be
96 represented as a C int, raise OverflowError.
97
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000098- test__locale is skipped on OS X < 10.4 (only partial locale support is
Walter Dörwald6611a8b2005-10-09 19:28:35 +000099 present).
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +0000100
Georg Brandl80bbf3f2005-09-14 19:38:29 +0000101- SF bug #893549: parsing keyword arguments was broken with a few format
102 codes.
103
Guido van Rossum8ee3e5a2005-09-14 18:09:42 +0000104- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on AIX 5.3
105 with IBM's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1284289). This also closes SF
106 bug #105470: test_pwd fails on 64bit system (Opteron).
107
Guido van Rossum539c6622005-09-14 17:49:54 +0000108- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on HP-UX 11 on
109 Itanium2 with HP's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1225212).
110
Georg Brandl4550b8d2005-08-26 06:43:52 +0000111- Disallow keyword arguments for type constructors that don't use them
Georg Brandl02c42872005-08-26 06:42:30 +0000112 (fixes bug #1119418).
113
Martin v. Löwisd35edda2005-08-24 08:39:24 +0000114- Forward UnicodeDecodeError into SyntaxError for source encoding errors.
115
Barry Warsawe2eca0b2005-08-15 18:14:19 +0000116- SF bug #900092: When tracing (e.g. for hotshot), restore 'return' events for
117 exceptions that cause a function to exit.
118
Raymond Hettinger9f1a6792005-07-31 01:16:36 +0000119- The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
120 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
121 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
122
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +0000123- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
124
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +0000125- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
126 reference counts in some error exit cases.
127
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000128- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
129 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
130 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
131 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
132 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
133 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
134 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
135 realloc.
136
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +0000137- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
138 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
139
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +0000140- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
141 like their int counterparts.
142
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +0000143- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
144 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
145 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
146 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
147 for a longer write-up of the problem).
148
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +0000149- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
150 serializing floats.
151
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +0000152- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
153 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
154 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
155
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +0000156- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
157 278.
158
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000159- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
160 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
161 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
162 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000163 to the base class has been moved to the proper nb_* magic slot and out of
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000164 PyNumber_*().
165 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
166
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +0000167- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
168 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
169 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
170 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
171
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +0000172- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
173 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
174 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
175 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
176 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
177
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +0000178- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
179 disabled caused a crash.
180
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000181- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
182 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
183
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000184- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +0000185 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
186
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +0000187- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
188
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000189- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +0000190 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
191 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
192 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000193
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +0000194- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
195
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +0000196- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
197 returning None.
198
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000199- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +0000200 ('\') with a specific error message.
201
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +0000202- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
203
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +0000204- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
205 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
206
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000207- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000208 an ferror() call.
209
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000210- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
211 list.sort().
212
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000213- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
214 (2+3) --> (5).
215
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000216- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
217
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000218- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
219 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000220
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000221- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
222 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
223 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
224
Neil Schemenauercf52c072005-08-12 17:34:58 +0000225- Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a
226 unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and
227 calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance.
228
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000229Extension Modules
230-----------------
231
Guido van Rossum1968ad32006-02-25 22:38:04 +0000232- Patch 1433928: Added a new type, defaultdict, to the collections module.
233 This uses the new __missing__ hook behavior added to dict (see above).
234
Georg Brandldbd83392006-02-20 09:42:33 +0000235- Bug #854823: socketmodule now builds on Sun platforms even when
236 INET_ADDRSTRLEN is not defined.
237
Georg Brandlf4f44152006-02-18 22:29:33 +0000238- Patch #1393157: os.startfile() now has an optional argument to specify
239 a "command verb" to invoke on the file.
240
Neal Norwitz082b2df2006-02-07 07:04:46 +0000241- Bug #876637, prevent stack corruption when socket descriptor
242 is larger than FD_SETSIZE.
243
Neal Norwitz0e6bc8c2006-02-05 05:45:43 +0000244- Patch #1407135, bug #1424041: harmonize mmap behavior of anonymous memory.
245 mmap.mmap(-1, size) now returns anonymous memory in both Unix and Windows.
246 mmap.mmap(0, size) should not be used on Windows for anonymous memory.
247
Martin v. Löwis57a34e82006-02-04 19:12:37 +0000248- Patch #1422385: The nis module now supports access to domains other
249 than the system default domain.
250
Martin v. Löwis14694662006-02-03 12:54:16 +0000251- Use Win32 API to implement os.stat/fstat. As a result, subsecond timestamps
252 are reported, the limit on path name lengths is removed, and stat reports
253 WindowsError now (instead of OSError).
254
Gregory P. Smithcfc4a8d2006-01-29 19:46:23 +0000255- Add bsddb.db.DBEnv.set_tx_timestamp allowing time based database recovery.
256
Neal Norwitz62a21122006-01-25 05:21:55 +0000257- Bug #1413192, fix seg fault in bsddb if a transaction was deleted
258 before the env.
259
Martin v. Löwis11017b12006-01-14 18:12:57 +0000260- Patch #1103116: Basic AF_NETLINK support.
261
Neal Norwitz3b4fff82006-01-11 08:54:45 +0000262- Bug #1402308, (possible) segfault when using mmap.mmap(-1, ...)
263
Neal Norwitz88bbd732006-01-10 07:05:44 +0000264- Bug #1400822, _curses over{lay,write} doesn't work when passing 6 ints.
265 Also fix ungetmouse() which did not accept arguments properly.
266 The code now conforms to the documented signature.
267
Neal Norwitz5e3d8622006-01-09 06:24:35 +0000268- Bug #1400115, Fix segfault when calling curses.panel.userptr()
269 without prior setting of the userptr.
270
Neal Norwitz40c6b472006-01-05 05:43:35 +0000271- Fix 64-bit problems in bsddb.
272
Neal Norwitz8856fb72005-12-18 03:34:22 +0000273- Patch #1365916: fix some unsafe 64-bit mmap methods.
274
Hye-Shik Changc5c57e62005-12-12 11:48:32 +0000275- Bug #1290333: Added a workaround for cjkcodecs' _codecs_cn build
276 problem on AIX.
277
Georg Brandla13c2442005-11-22 19:30:31 +0000278- Bug #869197: os.setgroups rejects long integer arguments
279
Neal Norwitz0f46bbf2005-11-03 05:00:25 +0000280- Bug #1346533, select.poll() doesn't raise an error if timeout > sys.maxint
281
Neal Norwitz7b631792005-11-02 05:26:07 +0000282- Bug #1344508, Fix UNIX mmap leaking file descriptors
283
Neal Norwitzf3396542005-10-28 05:52:22 +0000284- Patch #1338314, Bug #1336623: fix tarfile so it can extract
285 REGTYPE directories from tarfiles written by old programs.
286
Gregory P. Smithe101df92006-01-24 20:09:45 +0000287- Patch #1407992, fixes broken bsddb module db associate when using
288 BerkeleyDB 3.3, 4.0 or 4.1.
289
290- Get bsddb module to build with BerkeleyDB version 4.4
291
292- Get bsddb module to build with BerkeleyDB version 3.2
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +0000293
Neal Norwitz484d9a42005-09-30 04:46:49 +0000294- Patch #1309009, Fix segfault in pyexpat when the XML document is in latin_1,
295 but Python incorrectly assumes it is in UTF-8 format
296
Georg Brandle677adc2005-09-29 13:40:49 +0000297- Fix parse errors in the readline module when compiling without threads.
298
Hye-Shik Chang9ceebd52005-09-24 14:58:47 +0000299- Patch #1288833: Removed thread lock from socket.getaddrinfo on
300 FreeBSD 5.3 and later versions which got thread-safe getaddrinfo(3).
301
Michael W. Hudson10402a32005-09-22 09:19:01 +0000302- Patches #1298449 and #1298499: Add some missing checks for error
303 returns in cStringIO.c.
304
Neal Norwitz058bde12005-09-21 06:44:25 +0000305- Patch #1297028: fix segfault if call type on MultibyteCodec,
306 MultibyteStreamReader, or MultibyteStreamWriter
307
Neal Norwitzcfe7dd92005-09-19 06:49:27 +0000308- Fix memory leak in posix.access().
309
Martin v. Löwis8b291e22005-09-18 08:17:56 +0000310- Patch #1213831: Fix typo in unicodedata._getcode.
311
Georg Brandlfb1ef852005-09-14 20:53:32 +0000312- Bug #1007046: os.startfile() did not accept unicode strings encoded in
313 the file system encoding.
314
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000315- Patch #756021: Special-case socket.inet_aton('255.255.255.255') for
316 platforms that don't have inet_aton().
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000317
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000318- Bug #1215928: Fix bz2.BZ2File.seek() for 64-bit file offsets.
319
320- Bug #1191043: Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines for files containing one
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000321 line without newlines.
322
Georg Brandl38387b82005-08-24 07:17:40 +0000323- Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did
324 on Windows.
325
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000326- Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
Martin v. Löwisebd9d5b2005-08-09 15:00:59 +0000327 st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
328
Michael W. Hudson8137bea2005-07-27 20:24:40 +0000329- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
330 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
331 for large or negative values.
332
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000333- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000334 implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false.
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000335
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000336- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
337
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000338- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
339 if available on the platform.
340
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000341- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
342 available on the platform.
343
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000344- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
345 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
346
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000347- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
348
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000349- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
350 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
351 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
352
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000353- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
354
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000355- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
356 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
357
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000358- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000359 file size.
360
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000361- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
362
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000363- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
364 {remove_history,replace_history}
365
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000366- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
367 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000368
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000369- stat_float_times is now True.
370
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000371- array.array objects are now picklable.
372
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000373- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
374 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
375
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000376- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
377 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
378 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
379
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000380- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
381 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000382
383Library
384-------
385
Georg Brandl8f7c54e2006-02-20 08:40:38 +0000386- Bug #1413790: zipfile now sanitizes absolute archive names that are
387 not allowed by the specs.
388
389- Bug #1413790: zipfile now sanitizes absolute archive names that are
390 not allowed by the specs.
391
Georg Brandlc98eeed2006-02-19 14:57:47 +0000392- Patch #1215184: FileInput now can be given an opening hook which can
393 be used to control how files are opened.
394
Georg Brandlc029f872006-02-19 14:12:34 +0000395- Patch #1212287: fileinput.input() now has a mode parameter for
396 specifying the file mode input files should be opened with.
397
Georg Brandl67e9fb92006-02-19 13:56:17 +0000398- Patch #1215184: fileinput now has a fileno() function for getting the
399 current file number.
400
Georg Brandl602b9ba2006-02-19 13:26:36 +0000401- Patch #1349274: gettext.install() now optionally installs additional
402 translation functions other than _() in the builtin namespace.
403
Georg Brandle4662172006-02-19 09:51:27 +0000404- Patch #1337756: fileinput now accepts Unicode filenames.
405
Georg Brandl7b4e7c22006-02-18 21:10:56 +0000406- Patch #1373643: The chunk module can now read chunks larger than
407 two gigabytes.
408
Georg Brandl21dd1af2006-02-17 13:35:13 +0000409- Patch #1417555: SimpleHTTPServer now returns Last-Modified headers.
410
Georg Brandlbd3bc4d2006-02-17 09:52:53 +0000411- Bug #1430298: It is now possible to send a mail with an empty
412 return address using smtplib.
413
Georg Brandl0e1abe22006-02-17 09:48:14 +0000414- Bug #1432260: The names of lambda functions are now properly displayed
415 in pydoc.
Georg Brandl501dd0d2006-02-17 09:45:40 +0000416
Martin v. Löwis00756902006-02-05 17:09:41 +0000417- Patch #1412872: zipfile now sets the creator system to 3 (Unix)
418 unless the system is Win32.
419
Martin v. Löwisc81e3a62006-01-30 15:04:31 +0000420- Patch #1349118: urllib now supports user:pass@ style proxy
Martin v. Löwis3e865952006-01-24 15:51:21 +0000421 specifications, raises IOErrors when proxies for unsupported protocols
422 are defined, and uses the https proxy on https redirections.
423
Georg Brandl531ceba2006-01-21 07:20:56 +0000424- Bug #902075: urllib2 now supports 'host:port' style proxy specifications.
425
426- Bug #1407902: Add support for sftp:// URIs to urlparse.
Georg Brandl89f35ac2006-01-20 17:24:23 +0000427
Georg Brandlb709c2c2006-01-20 09:07:35 +0000428- Bug #1371247: Update Windows locale identifiers in locale.py.
429
Neal Norwitzf60cd472006-01-14 07:05:13 +0000430- Bug #1394565: SimpleHTTPServer now doesn't choke on query parameters
Georg Brandl45ab2332006-01-13 17:05:56 +0000431 any more.
Georg Brandlb709c2c2006-01-20 09:07:35 +0000432
Georg Brandl4edd9892006-01-13 16:59:46 +0000433- Bug #1403410: The warnings module now doesn't get confused
434 when it can't find out the module name it generates a warning for.
Georg Brandlb709c2c2006-01-20 09:07:35 +0000435
Martin v. Löwis412ed3b2006-01-08 10:45:39 +0000436- Patch #1177307: Added a new codec utf_8_sig for UTF-8 with a BOM signature.
437
Neal Norwitzab86f8e2005-12-23 21:44:36 +0000438- Patch #1157027: cookielib mishandles RFC 2109 cookies in Netscape mode
439
Neal Norwitz338e7862005-12-23 21:27:46 +0000440- Patch #1117398: cookielib.LWPCookieJar and .MozillaCookieJar now raise
441 LoadError as documented, instead of IOError. For compatibility,
442 LoadError subclasses IOError.
443
Brett Cannon3cbd0382005-12-16 22:49:23 +0000444- Added the hashlib module. It provides secure hash functions for MD5 and
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000445 SHA1, 224, 256, 384, and 512. Note that recent developments make the
446 historic MD5 and SHA1 unsuitable for cryptographic-strength applications.
447 In <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-December/058850.html>
448 Ronald L. Rivest offered this advice for Python:
449
450 "The consensus of researchers in this area (at least as
451 expressed at the NIST Hash Function Workshop 10/31/05),
452 is that SHA-256 is a good choice for the time being, but
453 that research should continue, and other alternatives may
454 arise from this research. The larger SHA's also seem OK."
Brett Cannon3cbd0382005-12-16 22:49:23 +0000455
Fredrik Lundh7e0aef02005-12-12 18:54:55 +0000456- Added a subset of Fredrik Lundh's ElementTree package. Available
457 modules are xml.etree.ElementTree, xml.etree.ElementPath, and
458 xml.etree.ElementInclude, from ElementTree 1.2.6.
459
Martin v. Löwis307021f2005-11-27 16:59:04 +0000460- Patch #1162825: Support non-ASCII characters in IDLE window titles.
461
Georg Brandl1f663572005-11-26 16:50:44 +0000462- Bug #1365984: urllib now opens "data:" URLs again.
463
Brett Cannonad07ff22005-11-23 02:15:50 +0000464- Patch #1314396: prevent deadlock for threading.Thread.join() when an exception
465 is raised within the method itself on a previous call (e.g., passing in an
466 illegal argument)
467
Brett Cannon5d0bf942005-11-02 23:04:26 +0000468- Bug #1340337: change time.strptime() to always return ValueError when there
469 is an error in the format string.
470
Georg Brandle8f24432005-10-03 14:16:44 +0000471- Patch #754022: Greatly enhanced webbrowser.py (by Oleg Broytmann).
472
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000473- Bug #729103: pydoc.py: Fix docother() method to accept additional
Georg Brandl8b813db2005-10-01 16:32:31 +0000474 "parent" argument.
475
Georg Brandlaa935172005-09-29 20:49:16 +0000476- Patch #1300515: xdrlib.py: Fix pack_fstring() to really use null bytes
477 for padding.
478
Georg Brandl80ba8e82005-09-29 20:16:07 +0000479- Bug #1296004: httplib.py: Limit maximal amount of data read from the
480 socket to avoid a MemoryError on Windows.
481
Matthias Klosef3f231f2005-09-20 07:02:49 +0000482- Patch #1166948: locale.py: Prefer LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE and LANG over LANGUAGE
483 to get the correct encoding.
484
485- Patch #1166938: locale.py: Parse LANGUAGE as a colon separated list of
486 languages.
487
Martin v. Löwis4ed67382005-09-18 08:34:39 +0000488- Patch #1268314: Cache lines in StreamReader.readlines for performance.
489
Brett Cannona783d062005-09-15 02:34:56 +0000490- Bug #1290505: Fix clearing the regex cache for time.strptime().
491
Martin v. Löwis5dbdc592005-08-27 10:07:56 +0000492- Bug #1167128: Fix size of a symlink in a tarfile to be 0.
493
Georg Brandl5a650a22005-08-26 08:51:34 +0000494- Patch #810023: Fix off-by-one bug in urllib.urlretrieve reporthook
495 functionality.
496
Martin v. Löwis8b595142005-08-25 11:03:38 +0000497- Bug #1163178: Make IDNA return an empty string when the input is empty.
498
Georg Brandl532efab2005-08-24 22:34:21 +0000499- Patch #848017: Make Cookie more RFC-compliant. Use CRLF as default output
500 separator and do not output trailing semicola.
501
Georg Brandlb9256022005-08-24 18:46:39 +0000502- Patch #1062060: urllib.urlretrieve() now raises a new exception, named
503 ContentTooShortException, when the actually downloaded size does not
504 match the Content-Length header.
505
Martin v. Löwis0a5d4a22005-08-24 14:55:22 +0000506- Bug #1121494: distutils.dir_utils.mkpath now accepts Unicode strings.
507
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000508- Bug #1178484: Return complete lines from codec stream readers
509 even if there is an exception in later lines, resulting in
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000510 correct line numbers for decoding errors in source code.
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000511
Georg Brandl6d2b3462005-08-24 07:36:17 +0000512- Bug #1192315: Disallow negative arguments to clear() in pdb.
513
Martin v. Löwisb813c532005-08-07 20:51:04 +0000514- Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
515
Georg Brandl649f8e72005-08-03 07:30:12 +0000516- Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
517 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
518
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000519- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
520 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
521 Tkdnd.
522
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000523- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
524 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
525
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000526- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
527 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
528
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000529- textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000530 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
531
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000532- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
533 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
534
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000535- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
536 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
537
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000538- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000539 it can be missing in embedded interpreters
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000540
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000541- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
542
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000543- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
544 error messages.
545
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000546- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
547
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000548- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
549 Bug #1224621.
550
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000551- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
552 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
553 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
554 terminates by raising StopIteration.
555
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000556- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
557
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000558- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
559 component of the path.
560
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000561- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
562 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
563 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
564 class at all.
565
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000566- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
567 files to PyPI.
568
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000569- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
570 them to PyPI.
571
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000572- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
573 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
574 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
575 work as expected.
576
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000577- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
578 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
579
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000580- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000581 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
582
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000583- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
584
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000585- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
586 to build.
587
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000588- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
589 symbolic links on Windows.
590
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000591- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000592 profile.py if available.
593
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000594- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
595
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000596- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
597 in LWPCookieJar.
598
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000599- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
600
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000601- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
602
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000603- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
604
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000605- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
606
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000607- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
608
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000609- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
610
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000611- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
612
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000613- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
614
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000615- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
616 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
617 be exploited in various ways.
618
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000619- Bug #1222790: in SimpleXMLRPCServer, set the reuse-address and close-on-exec
Andrew M. Kuchling3a976052005-12-04 15:07:41 +0000620 flags on the HTTP listening socket.
621
Andrew M. Kuchlinge63fde72005-12-04 15:36:57 +0000622- Bug #792570: SimpleXMLRPCServer had problems if the request grew too large.
623 Fixed by reading the HTTP body in chunks instead of one big socket.read().
624
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000625- Patches #893642, #1039083: add allow_none, encoding arguments to constructors of
Andrew M. Kuchling10a16de2005-12-04 16:34:40 +0000626 SimpleXMLRPCServer and CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler.
627
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000628- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
629
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000630- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
631
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000632- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
633
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000634- Enhancements to the csv module:
635
636 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000637 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000638 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000639 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
640 reporting.
641 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
642 dictates.
643 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000644 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000645 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000646 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
647 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000648 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
649 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000650 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000651 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
652 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
653 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
654 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
655 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
656 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
657 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
658 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
659 without first creating a dialect class.
660 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
661 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
662 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000663 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000664 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
665 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000666 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
667 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
668 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
669 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000670 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
671 This has been fixed.
672
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000673- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
674 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
675 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
676 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
677
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000678- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
679
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000680- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
681 (Bug #951915).
682
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000683- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
684 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
685 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000686 encoding alias table.
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000687
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000688- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
689
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000690- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
691 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
692
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000693- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
694
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000695- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
696
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000697- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
698
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000699- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
700
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000701- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
702
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000703- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
704 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
705 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
706
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000707- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000708 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000709
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000710- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
711 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
712 tokenizer with very long source lines.
713
Barry Warsaw538561e2006-01-01 21:48:54 +0000714- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called
715 immediately after creating the object, without any intervening
716 ``.decompress()`` calls.
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000717
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000718- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
719 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000720
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000721- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
722 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
723
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000724- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
725 correctly.
726
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000727- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
728 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
729 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
730 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
731 between two lines.
732
Walter Dörwalda47d1c02005-08-30 10:23:14 +0000733- Bug #1251300: On UCS-4 builds the "unicode-internal" codec will now complain
734 about illegal code points. The codec now supports PEP 293 style error
735 handlers.
736
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000737- Bug #1235646: ``codecs.StreamRecoder.next()`` now reencodes the data it reads
Walter Dörwaldc5238b82005-09-01 11:56:53 +0000738 from the input stream, so that the output is a byte string in the correct
739 encoding instead of a unicode string.
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000740
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000741- Bug #1202493: Fixing SRE parser to handle '{}' as perl does, rather than
742 considering it exactly like a '*'.
743
Walter Dörwald007f8df2005-10-09 19:42:27 +0000744- Bug #1245379: Add "unicode-1-1-utf-7" as an alias for "utf-7" to
745 ``encodings.aliases``.
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000746
Walter Dörwald09f0dd52005-11-21 19:10:07 +0000747- ` uu.encode()`` and ``uu.decode()`` now support unicode filenames.
748
Gustavo Niemeyer548148812006-01-31 18:34:13 +0000749- Patch #1413711: Certain patterns of differences were making difflib
750 touch the recursion limit.
751
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000752Build
753-----
754
Martin v. Löwis86d66262006-02-17 08:40:11 +0000755- Patch #1432345: Make python compile on DragonFly.
756
Martin v. Löwis856bf9a2006-02-14 20:42:55 +0000757- Build support for Win64-AMD64 was added.
758
Martin v. Löwisa55e55e2006-02-11 15:55:14 +0000759- Patch #1428494: Prefer linking against ncursesw over ncurses library.
760
Martin v. Löwisfd9a72a2006-01-08 10:07:33 +0000761- Patch #881820: look for openpty and forkpty also in libbsd.
762
Martin v. Löwis64c33dd2006-01-03 07:42:14 +0000763- The sources of zlib are now part of the Python distribution (zlib 1.2.3).
764 The zlib module is now builtin on Windows.
765
Martin v. Löwisd5845ec2005-12-30 12:31:38 +0000766- Use -xcode=pic32 for CCSHARED on Solaris with SunPro.
767
Martin v. Löwis147fbe52005-08-07 21:09:30 +0000768- Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
769 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
770
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000771- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
772 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
773
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000774- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
775 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
776 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000777 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000778
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000779- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
780 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
781 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
782
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000783- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
784
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000785- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
786 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
787
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000788- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
789 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
790 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
791 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
792 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
793 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
794 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
795 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
796
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000797- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
798 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
799 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
800 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
801
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000802C API
803-----
804
Raymond Hettingerbeb31012005-08-16 03:47:52 +0000805- Added a C API for set and frozenset objects.
806
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000807- Removed PyRange_New().
808
Walter Dörwaldd1c1e102005-10-06 20:29:57 +0000809- Patch #1313939: PyUnicode_DecodeCharmap() accepts a unicode string as the
810 mapping argument now. This string is used as a mapping table. Byte values
811 greater than the length of the string and 0xFFFE are treated as undefined
812 mappings.
813
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000814
815Tests
816-----
817
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000818- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000819
Hye-Shik Changaaa2f1d2005-12-10 17:44:27 +0000820- Patch #1276356: New resource "urlfetch" is implemented. This enables
821 even impatient people to run tests that require remote files.
822
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000823
824Documentation
825-------------
826
Georg Brandl8cb30772006-01-20 09:34:29 +0000827- Bug #1402224: Add warning to dl docs about crashes.
828
Georg Brandla3a93ae2006-01-20 09:14:36 +0000829- Bug #1396471: Document that Windows' ftell() can return invalid
830 values for text files with UNIX-style line endings.
831
Georg Brandl32252422005-09-14 20:42:00 +0000832- Bug #1274828: Document os.path.splitunc().
833
Georg Brandl79c122f2005-08-24 07:31:33 +0000834- Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py.
835
Georg Brandl6f2bbd32005-08-24 07:26:55 +0000836- Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation.
837
Georg Brandlf13c4ba2005-08-02 10:28:08 +0000838- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
839
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000840- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
841
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000842- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
843
844- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
845
846- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
847
848- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
849
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000850- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
851 Closes bug #1166582.
852
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000853- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
854 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
855 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
856
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000857Mac
858---
859
860
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000861New platforms
862-------------
863
864- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
865
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000866
867Tools/Demos
868-----------
869
Georg Brandl56897312005-08-24 18:32:30 +0000870- Added two new files to Tools/scripts: pysource.py, which recursively
871 finds Python source files, and findnocoding.py, which finds Python
872 source files that need an encoding declaration.
873 Patch #784089, credits to Oleg Broytmann.
874
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000875- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
876
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000877- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000878
Barry Warsaw538561e2006-01-01 21:48:54 +0000879- Fixed a display glitch in Pynche, which could cause the right arrow to
880 wiggle over by a pixel.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000881
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000882What's New in Python 2.4 final?
883===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000884
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000885*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000886
887Core and builtins
888-----------------
889
890- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
891 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
892 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
893
894
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000895What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
896==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000897
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000898*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000899
900Core and builtins
901-----------------
902
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000903- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
904 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
905 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
906
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000907
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000908Library
909-------
910
911- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
912 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
913 raised is re-raised.
914
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000915- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
916 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
917
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000918- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
919 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
920 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
921 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
922 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
923 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
924 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
925 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
926 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
927 by the slice are recomputed now.
928
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000929- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000930
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000931Build
932-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000933
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000934- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
935 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
936 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000937
938C API
939-----
940
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000941- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
942
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000943
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000944What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
945================================
946
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000947*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000948
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000949License
950-------
951
952The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
953is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
954changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
955Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
956intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
957durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
958the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
959License::
960
961 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
962
963says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
964to Python 2.1.1.
965
966The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
967License Version 2.
968
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000969Core and builtins
970-----------------
971
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000972- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
973 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
974 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
975 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
976 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
977 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
978 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
Andrew M. Kuchlingb2a739d2005-11-22 15:14:44 +0000979 ``AttributeError`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000980 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
981 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
982
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000983- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000984
985Extension Modules
986-----------------
987
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000988- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
989 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
990 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
991 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000992
993Library
994-------
995
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000996- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
997 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
998 returned.
999
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +00001000- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
1001
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +00001002- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
1003 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
1004
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +00001005- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
1006
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +00001007- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
1008 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001009
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +00001010- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
1011
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +00001012- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
1013
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +00001014- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +00001015 the source code is updated and reloaded.
1016
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001017Build
1018-----
1019
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +00001020- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001021
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001022What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
1023================================
1024
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +00001025*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001026
1027Core and builtins
1028-----------------
1029
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +00001030- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +00001031 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
1032
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +00001033- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
1034 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
1035 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
1036 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
1037
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +00001038- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
1039 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
1040
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +00001041- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
1042 constant.
1043
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +00001044- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
1045 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
1046 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
1047 large), and to anomalies such as
1048 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
1049 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
1050 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
1051 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001052
1053Extension modules
1054-----------------
1055
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +00001056- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
1057 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +00001058 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
1059 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
1060 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001061
1062Library
1063-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +00001064
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +00001065- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +00001066 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +00001067 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
1068 --swig-cpp.
1069
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +00001070- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
1071 it is set.
1072
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +00001073- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +00001074
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +00001075- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
1076 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
1077 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
1078 Closes bug #1039270.
1079
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +00001080- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +00001081
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +00001082 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +00001083 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
1084 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
1085 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
1086 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
1087 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
1088 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
1089 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
1090 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
1091 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
1092 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
1093 + Updates to documentation.
1094
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +00001095- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
1096 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
1097 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
1098 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
1099
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +00001100- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001101
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +00001102- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
1103 applications should use the getmember function.
1104
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +00001105- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
1106
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +00001107- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
1108 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
1109 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
1110 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
1111 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
1112 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
1113 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
1114 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
1115 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
1116
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001117- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
1118 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +00001119 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001120
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +00001121- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
1122 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
1123 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
1124 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
1125 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
1126 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
1127 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
1128 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001129
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +00001130- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
1131 the new public features (of which there are many).
1132
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +00001133- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001134 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
1135 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
1136 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
1137 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +00001138 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001139
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +00001140- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
1141
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +00001142- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
1143 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
1144 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
1145 options.
1146
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +00001147- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
1148 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
1149 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
1150 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
1151 conditions under which non-string values work.
1152
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001153Build
1154-----
1155
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +00001156- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
1157 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
1158 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
1159
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +00001160- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
1161 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
1162 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
1163 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
1164 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001165
1166C API
1167-----
1168
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +00001169- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
1170 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
1171
1172- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
1173
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +00001174- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
1175 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
1176 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
1177 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
1178 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
1179 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
1180 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
1181 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
1182 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
1183
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +00001184- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
1185
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +00001186- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
1187 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
1188 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001189
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001190Tests
1191-----
1192
1193- test__locale ported to unittest
1194
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001195Mac
1196---
1197
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +00001198- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
1199 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
1200 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001201
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001202Tools/Demos
1203-----------
1204
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +00001205- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
1206 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
1207 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
1208 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
1209 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001210
1211
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001212What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
1213=================================
1214
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +00001215*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001216
1217Core and builtins
1218-----------------
1219
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001220- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001221 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
1222
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001223- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
1224 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
1225 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
1226 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
1227 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
1228 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
1229 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
1230 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001231 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
1232 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
1233 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
1234 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
1235 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001236
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +00001237- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
1238 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
1239 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
1240 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
1241 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
1242
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +00001243- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
1244
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +00001245- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
1246 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
1247
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +00001248- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
1249 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
1250 modified the list.
1251
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +00001252- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
1253 functions is now writable.
1254
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +00001255- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
1256 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
1257 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
1258 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
1259
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001260- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
1261 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
1262 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
1263 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
1264 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +00001265
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +00001266- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
1267 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
1268
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001269Extension modules
1270-----------------
1271
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001272- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
1273
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +00001274- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
1275 data.
1276
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001277- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
1278 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
1279 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
1280 supposed to have been truncated away.
1281
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +00001282- Added socket.socketpair().
1283
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +00001284- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
1285 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
1286
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001287- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +00001288 versions of Python, have now been removed.
1289
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001290Library
1291-------
1292
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001293- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001294 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001295
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +00001296- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
1297 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
1298
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +00001299- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
1300 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
1301
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001302- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
1303
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +00001304- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
1305 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +00001306
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +00001307- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
1308 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
1309
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +00001310- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
1311
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +00001312- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
1313
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +00001314- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
1315
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +00001316- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
1317 Percivall.
1318
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +00001319- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
1320 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
1321
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001322- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
1323 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
1324 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001325 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001326
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001327- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
1328 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
1329 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
1330 and exponent.
1331
1332- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
1333
1334- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +00001335 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001336 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
1337
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001338- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
1339 to the readline module.
1340
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001341- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001342 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
1343 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001344
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +00001345- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
1346 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
1347 contains symlinks.
1348
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +00001349- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
1350 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
1351
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +00001352- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
1353 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
1354 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1355
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001356- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
1357 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
1358 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
1359 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
1360 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
1361 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
1362 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
1363 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
1364 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
1365 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
1366 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
1367 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
1368 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
1369
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +00001370- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
1371
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001372Tools/Demos
1373-----------
1374
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001375- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
1376 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
1377
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +00001378- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
1379
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001380Build
1381-----
1382
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001383- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
1384 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
1385 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
1386 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
1387 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
1388 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
1389 plans to do so.
1390
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +00001391- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
1392 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
1393
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +00001394- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
1395 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
1396
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001397- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
1398 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
1399
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +00001400- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
1401 GNU/k*BSD systems.
1402
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +00001403- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
1404 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
1405
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001406C API
1407-----
1408
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001409..
1410
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001411Documentation
1412-------------
1413
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001414- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1415 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1416
1417- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1418 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1419 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001420
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001421New platforms
1422-------------
1423
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001424- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1425
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001426Tests
1427-----
1428
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001429..
1430
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001431Windows
1432-------
1433
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001434- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1435 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1436 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1437 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1438 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1439 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1440 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1441 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1442 the problem.
1443
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001444Mac
1445---
1446
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001447..
1448
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001449
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001450What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1451=================================
1452
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001453*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001454
1455Core and builtins
1456-----------------
1457
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001458- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1459 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1460 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1461 sensitive code.
1462
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001463- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001464 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001465
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001466 @staticmethod
1467 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001468
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001469 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001470
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001471- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1472 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1473 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1474 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1475 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1476 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1477 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1478 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1479 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1480 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1481 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1482
1483 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1484 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1485 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1486 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1487 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1488 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1489 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1490
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001491- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1492 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1493
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001494- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001495 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001496
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001497- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001498 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001499 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1500
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001501- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001502 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1503 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1504
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001505- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1506 types that support garbage collection.
1507
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001508- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1509
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001510- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1511 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1512 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1513 Jython.
1514
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001515- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1516
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001517- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1518 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1519
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001520- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1521 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1522 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001523
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001524- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1525 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1526 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1527
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001528Extension modules
1529-----------------
1530
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001531- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1532
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001533Library
1534-------
1535
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001536- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1537 TIS-620
1538
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001539- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1540 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1541 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1542 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1543 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1544 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1545 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1546 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1547 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1548 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1549
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001550- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1551
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001552- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1553 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1554 same as when the argument is omitted).
1555 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1556
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001557- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1558
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001559- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1560 schemes are offered.
1561
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001562- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1563
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001564- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1565 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1566 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1567
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001568- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1569
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001570- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1571 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1572
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001573- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1574 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1575 when dummy_threading is being used.
1576
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001577- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1578 from a tarfile.
1579
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001580- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001581 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001582
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001583- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1584 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1585 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1586 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1587
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001588- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1589 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1590
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001591- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1592 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1593 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1594 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1595 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1596 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1597 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1598 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1599 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1600 by some other method in progress).
1601
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001602- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1603 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1604 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001605
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001606- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1607
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001608- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1609 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1610 AM Kuchling.
1611
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001612- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1613 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1614 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1615
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001616- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1617 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1618 instead of unsigned.
1619
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001620- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001621 no longer part of the public API.
1622
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001623- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1624 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1625 string methods of the same name).
1626
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001627- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001628 SF patch 945642.
1629
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001630- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1631
1632 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1633
1634 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1635 DocTestSuites.
1636
1637- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1638 that provide thread-local data.
1639
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001640- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1641 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1642
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001643- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1644
1645- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1646 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1647 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1648
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001649- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1650
1651 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1652 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1653 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001654
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001655 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1656 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1657 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1658 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1659
1660 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1661 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1662
1663 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1664 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1665 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1666 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1667
1668 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1669 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1670 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1671 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1672 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1673
1674 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1675 wrapping help output.
1676
1677 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1678 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1679 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001680
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001681C API
1682-----
1683
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001684- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1685 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1686 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1687 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1688 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1689 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1690 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1691 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1692 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1693 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1694 its visible semantics have not changed.
1695
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001696- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1697 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1698
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001699Documentation
1700-------------
1701
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001702- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001703
1704 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001705 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001706
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001707 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001708
1709 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1710
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001711- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001712
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001713Tests
1714-----
1715
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001716- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001717 platforms that use the Makefile.
1718
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001719- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1720 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1721 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1722
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001723
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001724What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1725=================================
1726
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001727*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001728
1729Core and builtins
1730-----------------
1731
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001732- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1733 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1734 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1735 objects now (one object instead of three).
1736
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001737- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1738 Windows DLLs.
1739
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001740- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1741 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001742
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001743- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1744 a new .pyc magic.
1745
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001746- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1747 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1748 be there.
1749
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001750- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1751 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1752 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1753
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001754- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1755 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1756 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1757
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001758- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1759
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001760- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1761 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1762 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001763
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001764- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1765 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1766
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001767- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1768
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001769- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001770 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001771
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001772- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1773
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001774- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1775
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001776- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1777 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1778
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001779- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1780 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1781 Fixes bug #858016 .
1782
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001783- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1784 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1785 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1786
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001787- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1788 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1789 improves their performance (about 35%).
1790
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001791- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1792 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1793 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1794
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001795- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1796 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1797 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1798 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1799
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001800- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1801 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001802 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001803 length is not known).
1804
1805- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1806 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001807 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1808 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001809 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1810
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001811- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1812 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1813
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001814- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1815 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1816 keyword arguments.
1817
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001818- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1819 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1820 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1821
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001822- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1823 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1824 cases.
1825
1826- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1827 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1828 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1829 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1830 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1831 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1832 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1833 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1834 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1835 a release build.
1836
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001837- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1838 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1839
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001840- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001841 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001842
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001843- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1844 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1845 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1846 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1847 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1848 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1849 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1850 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1851 destroyed.
1852
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001853- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1854 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1855 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1856 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1857 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1858 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1859 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1860 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1861
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001862- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1863 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1864 character other than a space.
1865
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001866- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1867 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1868 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1869 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1870 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1871 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1872 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1873 attributes with the same name.
1874
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001875- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1876 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1877 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1878 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1879 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1880 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1881 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1882 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1883 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1884 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1885 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1886 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1887 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1888 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001889
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001890- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1891 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1892 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1893 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1894 This has been repaired.
1895
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001896- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1897
1898- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1899
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001900- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1901 over a sequence.
1902
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001903- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001904 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001905
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001906- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1907
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001908- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1909 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1910 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1911 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1912 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1913 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1914 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1915 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1916
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001917- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1918 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1919 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1920
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001921- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1922 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1923 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1924 freelist.
1925
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001926- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1927 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1928
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001929- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1930 number.
1931
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001932- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1933 a TypeError exception.
1934
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001935- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1936 820195.
1937
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001938- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1939 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1940 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1941
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001942- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001943 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1944 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001945
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001946- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1947 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1948 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1949
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001950- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1951 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001952 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001953
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001954- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001955 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1956 the first call.
1957
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001958
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001959Extension modules
1960-----------------
1961
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001962- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1963 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1964
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001965- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1966 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1967 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1968 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1969 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1970 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1971 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001972
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001973- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1974
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001975- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1976
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001977- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1978 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1979
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001980- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1981 fewer false positives.
1982
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001983- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1984 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1985
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001986- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001987 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1988
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001989- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001990 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001991 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001992 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1993 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001994
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001995- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1996 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1997 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1998 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1999
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00002000- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
2001 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
2002 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
2003 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
2004 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
2005 #897625.
2006
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00002007- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
2008 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
2009
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00002010- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
2011 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
2012 and pops on either side of the deque.
2013
2014- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
2015 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
2016
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00002017- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
2018 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
2019 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
2020 other functions that expect a function argument.
2021
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00002022- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
2023
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00002024- os.getsid was added.
2025
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00002026- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
2027 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
2028 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
2029
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00002030- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
2031
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00002032- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
2033
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00002034- readline.clear_history was added.
2035
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00002036- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
2037
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00002038- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
2039
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00002040- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
2041
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00002042- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
2043
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00002044- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
2045
2046- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
2047
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00002048- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
2049
2050- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
2051
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00002052- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
2053 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
2054 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
2055
2056- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
2057 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
2058 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
2059 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
2060 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
2061 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
2062 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
2063
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00002064- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
2065 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
2066 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
2067 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00002068
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002069- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00002070 iterators from a single iterable.
2071
2072- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
2073 of raising a TypeError exception.
2074
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00002075- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
2076 as parameter.
2077
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002078Library
2079-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00002080
Armin Rigoa871ef22006-02-08 12:53:56 +00002081- Added a new module: cProfile, a C profiler with the same interface as the
2082 profile module. cProfile avoids some of the drawbacks of the hotshot
2083 profiler and provides a bit more information than the other two profilers.
2084 Based on "lsprof" (patch #1212837).
2085
Georg Brandlf0de6a12005-08-22 18:02:59 +00002086- Bug #1266283: The new function "lexists" is now in os.path.__all__.
2087
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00002088- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
2089 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
2090 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002091
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00002092- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
2093 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
2094 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00002095
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00002096- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00002097
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00002098- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
2099 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00002100
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00002101- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
2102 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
2103
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00002104- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
2105
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00002106- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00002107 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00002108
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002109- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00002110 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002111
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00002112- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
2113
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00002114- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
2115 on cygwin and mingw32.
2116
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00002117- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
2118
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00002119- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
2120 module.
2121
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00002122- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
2123 installation scheme for all platforms.
2124
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00002125- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00002126 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00002127
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00002128- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
2129 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
2130 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
2131
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00002132- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
2133 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
2134 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
2135
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00002136- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
2137
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00002138- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
2139
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00002140- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
2141 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
2142
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00002143- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
2144 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
2145 type pattern with the same value exists.
2146
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00002147- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
2148 when run from the command prompt).
2149
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00002150- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
2151 not taken into consideration when caching value.
2152
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00002153- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
2154 default sort).
2155
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00002156- Added global runctx function to profile module
2157
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00002158- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
2159
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00002160- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
2161
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00002162- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
2163
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002164- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00002165 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
2166 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
2167 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
2168 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
2169 accordingly.
2170
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00002171- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
2172 decoding standards.
2173
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00002174- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
2175 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
2176 called for all requests.
2177
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00002178- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
2179 they are passed to the compiler.
2180
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00002181- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
2182 indent, width and depth.
2183
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00002184- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
2185 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
2186
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00002187- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
2188 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
2189
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00002190- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
2191
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00002192- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
2193
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00002194- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
2195
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00002196- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
2197 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
2198
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00002199- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00002200 for better performance.
2201
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002202- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00002203
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00002204- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
2205 a string).
2206
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00002207- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
2208
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00002209- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
2210
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00002211- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
2212
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00002213- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
2214
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00002215- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
2216 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
2217 list of fieldnames.
2218
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00002219- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
2220 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
2221
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00002222- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
2223
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00002224- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
2225 empty lists.
2226
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00002227- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
2228 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
2229 and shelves.
2230
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00002231- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
2232 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
2233
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002234- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00002235 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
2236 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002237
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00002238- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
2239 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00002240 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00002241
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002242- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00002243 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
2244 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
2245
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002246- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
2247 and removed in Py2.4.
2248
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00002249- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
2250
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00002251- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
2252
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002253Tools/Demos
2254-----------
2255
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00002256- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
2257 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
2258
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00002259- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
2260
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00002261- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
2262 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
2263 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
2264 destination in situations where both files are given.
2265
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00002266- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
2267 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
2268 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
2269 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
2270
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00002271- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
2272
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00002273- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
2274 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
2275 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
2276 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
2277 now.
2278
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002279- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
2280 in effect
2281
2282- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
2283 C-c C-h
2284
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00002285- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
2286 -d option was given.
2287
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002288Build
2289-----
2290
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00002291- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
2292 build under OS X.
2293
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00002294- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
2295 --enable-profiling.
2296
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00002297- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
2298 is configured --with-tsc.
2299
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00002300- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
2301 on AMD64.
2302
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00002303- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
2304 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
2305
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00002306- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
2307 removed.
2308
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00002309- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
2310 supported (see PEP 11).
2311
2312- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
2313
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00002314- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
2315
2316- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
2317 (see PEP 11).
2318
2319- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
2320 sizeof(char) must be 1.
2321
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002322C API
2323-----
2324
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00002325- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
2326 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
2327 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
2328
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00002329- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
2330 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
2331 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
2332 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
2333
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00002334- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
2335 generator objects.
2336
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002337- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
2338 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00002339 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
2340 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002341
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00002342- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
2343 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
2344
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00002345- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
2346 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
2347 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
2348 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
2349 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
2350
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00002351- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
2352 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
2353 about 10% faster.
2354
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00002355- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
2356 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
2357
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00002358- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
2359 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
2360 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
2361 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
2362
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002363Windows
2364-------
2365
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00002366- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
2367 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
2368 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
2369 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
2370
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00002371- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
2372 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
2373 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
2374
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002375
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002376What's New in Python 2.3 final?
2377===============================
2378
2379*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
2380
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002381IDLE
2382----
2383
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00002384- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
2385 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
2386 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
2387 context-menu actions.
2388
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002389- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
2390 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
2391 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
2392 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
2393 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
2394 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
2395 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
2396 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
2397 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
2398
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002399
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002400What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
2401=============================================
2402
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00002403*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002404
2405Core and builtins
2406-----------------
2407
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002408- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002409 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002410 comment at the end are still unsupported.
2411
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002412Extension modules
2413-----------------
2414
2415- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
2416 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
2417 than once. This has been fixed.
2418
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002419- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2420 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2421 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2422 call.
2423
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002424- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2425
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002426Library
2427-------
2428
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002429- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2430 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2431
2432- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2433 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2434 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2435 restored.
2436
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002437IDLE
2438----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002439
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002440- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002441
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002442Build
2443-----
2444
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002445- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2446 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2447
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002448C API
2449-----
2450
2451Windows
2452-------
2453
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002454- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2455 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2456
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002457- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2458
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002459Mac
2460---
2461
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002462- Various fixes to pimp.
2463
2464- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2465
2466- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2467 more problems than it solves.
2468
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002469
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002470What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2471=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002472
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002473*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2474
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002475Core and builtins
2476-----------------
2477
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002478- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2479 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2480
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002481- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2482 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002483 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002484
2485- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2486 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2487 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002488 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002489
2490- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2491 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002492
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002493- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2494 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2495 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2496
2497- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002498 770247.
2499
2500- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002501
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002502Extension modules
2503-----------------
2504
2505- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2506 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2507
2508- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2509
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002510- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2511
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002512- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2513 contained within the _strptime module.
2514
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002515- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2516 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2517
2518- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002519 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2520
2521- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2522 the find_class attribute, if present.
2523
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002524- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002525
2526 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2527 (SF bug 763298).
2528
2529 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002530 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2531 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2532 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002533
2534 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2535
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002536Library
2537-------
2538
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002539- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2540
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002541- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2542 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2543 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2544 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2545 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2546 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2547 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2548 or Tester().
2549
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002550- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2551 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2552 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2553 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2554 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2555 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2556 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2557 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2558 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002559
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002560 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002561
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002562- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2563 weren't before was an oversight.
2564
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002565- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2566 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2567
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002568- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2569 when there are no lines.
2570
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002571- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2572 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2573
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002574- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2575 to child processes.
2576
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002577- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2578
2579- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2580
2581- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2582 xmlrpclib.
2583
2584- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2585 responses.
2586
2587- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2588 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2589
2590- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2591 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2592 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2593
2594- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2595 used as patterns.
2596
2597- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2598 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2599 than Tk 8.3.
2600
2601- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2602
2603- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002604
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002605Tools/Demos
2606-----------
2607
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002608- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2609
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002610- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2611
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002612- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002613
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002614Build
2615-----
2616
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002617- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2618
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002619- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2620
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002621- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2622 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002623
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002624- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2625 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2626 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002627
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002628C API
2629-----
2630
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002631- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2632 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2633
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002634Windows
2635-------
2636
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002637- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2638 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2639 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2640 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2641 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2642 Python exception ::
2643
2644 thread.error: can't start new thread
2645
2646 is raised now.
2647
2648- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2649 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2650 instead of from DLL teardown.
2651
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002652Mac
2653---
2654
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002655- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002656 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002657 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2658 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2659 the executable in the bundle.
2660
2661- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002662
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002663- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2664
2665- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2666 on Panther.
2667
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002668What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2669================================
2670
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002671*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002672
2673Core and builtins
2674-----------------
2675
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002676- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2677 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2678 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2679 with the -i option.
2680
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002681- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2682 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2683
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002684- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2685 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2686
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002687- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2688 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2689 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2690 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2691 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2692 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2693 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2694 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2695 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2696 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2697 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2698 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2699 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002700
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002701- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2702 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2703 embedded in a lambda expression.
2704
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002705- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2706 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2707 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2708 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2709 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2710
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002711- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2712 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2713 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2714
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002715- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2716 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2717
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002718- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2719 It's writable again.
2720
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002721- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2722 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2723 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002724 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002725
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002726- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2727 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2728 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2729
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002730Extension modules
2731-----------------
2732
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002733- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2734 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2735
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002736- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2737 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2738 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2739 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2740
2741- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2742 collection.
2743
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002744- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2745 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2746 unique within a single program run.
2747
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002748- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2749 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2750
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002751- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2752 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2753
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002754- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2755 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002756
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002757- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2758
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002759- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2760 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2761
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002762- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2763 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2764 for many BSD-derived systems.
2765
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002766
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002767Library
2768-------
2769
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002770- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2771 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2772 primary ones:
2773
2774 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2775 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2776 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2777
2778 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2779 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2780 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2781 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2782 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2783 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2784
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002785- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2786 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2787 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2788 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2789 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2790 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2791 argument.
2792
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002793- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2794 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2795 in the archive.
2796
2797- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2798 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2799
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002800- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2801 569574).
2802
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002803- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2804 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2805 no more.
2806
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002807- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2808 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2809 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2810 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2811 code coverage.
2812
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002813- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2814 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2815 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002816 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2817 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002818
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002819- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2820 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2821 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002822 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002823
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002824- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2825
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002826- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2827 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2828 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2829 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2830
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002831- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2832 handling.
2833
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002834- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2835 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2836
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002837- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2838 in socket.py.
2839
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002840- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2841
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002842- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2843 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2844 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2845 opener with proxy support.
2846
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002847- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2848
2849- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2850
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002851Tools/Demos
2852-----------
2853
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002854- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2855
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002856- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2857
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002858- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2859 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002860
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002861- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2862 files.
2863
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002864Build
2865-----
2866
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002867- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002868 different root directory.
2869
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002870C API
2871-----
2872
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002873- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2874 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2875 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2876 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2877 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2878 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2879 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2880 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2881 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2882 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2883
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002884- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2885 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2886 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2887 from Python.
2888
2889
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002890New platforms
2891-------------
2892
2893None this time.
2894
2895Tests
2896-----
2897
2898- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2899 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2900
2901Windows
2902-------
2903
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002904- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2905
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002906- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2907 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2908 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2909 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2910 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2911 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2912 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2913 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2914 that's what it's for.
2915
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002916Mac
2917---
2918
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002919- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2920 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2921 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2922 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002923- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2924 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2925- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002926
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002927SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2928------------------------------------
2929
2930430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2931598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2932622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2933661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2934683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2935697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2936713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2937724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2938727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2939729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2940730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2941731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2942732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2943733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2944735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2945740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2946744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2947745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2948747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2949749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2950751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2951753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2952755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2953757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2954760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2955
2956
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002957What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2958================================
2959
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002960*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002961
2962Core and builtins
2963-----------------
2964
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002965- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2966 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2967
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002968- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2969 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2970 and cannot be strings).
2971
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002972- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2973 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2974 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2975 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2976
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002977- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2978 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2979 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2980 Python itself.
2981
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002982- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2983 the referenced object, if it has one.
2984
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002985- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2986 the thread started at
2987 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2988
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002989- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2990 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2991 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2992 placed on a list index.
2993
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002994- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2995 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2996 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2997 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2998
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002999- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
3000 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
3001 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
3002 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
3003 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
3004 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
3005 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
3006
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00003007- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
3008 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
3009 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
3010 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
3011 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
3012
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00003013- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
3014 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00003015
3016- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
3017 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
3018 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
3019 #693195.)
3020
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00003021- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
3022 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003023
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00003024- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00003025 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00003026 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
3027 interpreter executions, would fail.
3028
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00003029- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00003030 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00003031 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00003032
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003033Extension modules
3034-----------------
3035
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00003036- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
3037 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
3038 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
3039 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
3040
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00003041- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
3042 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
3043
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00003044- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
3045 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
3046 and Greg Chapman.)
3047
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00003048- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
3049 recursively.
3050
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00003051- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00003052 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
3053 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
3054 leaks.
3055
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00003056- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
3057
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00003058- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
3059 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
3060 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
3061 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
3062 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
3063 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
3064 #705836.
3065
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00003066- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00003067 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
3068
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00003069- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
3070 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
3071 See SF bug #692416.
3072
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00003073- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
3074 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
3075
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00003076- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
3077 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
3078 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003079
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00003080- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00003081 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
3082 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
3083
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00003084- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
3085 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
3086 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
3087 timeouts to work properly.
3088
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003089Library
3090-------
3091
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00003092- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
3093 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
3094 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
3095 future release.
3096
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00003097- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
3098 for querying platform dependent features.
3099
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00003100- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00003101
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00003102- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
3103 pickle protocol versions.
3104
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00003105- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
3106 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
3107 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
3108
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00003109- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
3110
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00003111- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
3112 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
3113 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
3114 modules.
3115
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00003116- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
3117 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
3118 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
3119
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00003120- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
3121 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
3122
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00003123- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
3124 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
3125 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
3126
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003127- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00003128 MS Office extensions.
3129
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00003130- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
3131 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
3132
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00003133- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
3134 execution speed of expressions and statements.
3135
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003136- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
3137 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
3138 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
3139 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
3140 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
3141 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
3142
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00003143- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
3144 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
3145 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003146
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00003147- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
3148 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
3149 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
3150
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00003151- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
3152
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00003153- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
3154 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
3155 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
3156
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003157Tools/Demos
3158-----------
3159
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00003160- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
3161 See the module docstring for details.
3162
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003163Build
3164-----
3165
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00003166- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
3167 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003168
3169C API
3170-----
3171
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003172- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
3173
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00003174- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
3175 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
3176 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
3177
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003178- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
3179 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00003180
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003181 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
3182 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
3183 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00003184
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00003185- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00003186 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
3187
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00003188- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
3189 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
3190 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003191
3192New platforms
3193-------------
3194
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00003195None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003196
3197Tests
3198-----
3199
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00003200- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
3201 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003202
3203Windows
3204-------
3205
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00003206- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
3207 function.
3208
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00003209- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
3210 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003211
3212Mac
3213---
3214
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00003215- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
3216 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00003217
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00003218- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
3219 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003220
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00003221- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
3222 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
3223 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003224
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003225- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00003226 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
3227 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003228
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003229- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
3230 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003231
3232
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003233What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
3234=================================
3235
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003236*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003237
3238Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003239-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003240
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00003241- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
3242 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
3243 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
3244
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00003245- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
3246 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
3247 (SF patch #664376.)
3248
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003249- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
3250 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
3251 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
3252 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
3253 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
3254 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00003255 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003256
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003257- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
3258 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
3259 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
3260 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003261 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003262
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00003263- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
3264 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
3265 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
3266 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
3267 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
3268 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
3269 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
3270 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
3271 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
3272 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
3273 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
3274
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00003275- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
3276 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
3277 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
3278 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
3279 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
3280 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
3281
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00003282- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
3283 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
3284
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00003285- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
3286 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
3287 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
3288 case.)
3289
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00003290- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
3291 passed as unicode strings.
3292
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00003293- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
3294 See SF bug #683467.
3295
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00003296- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
3297 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
3298
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00003299- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
3300
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00003301- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
3302
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00003303- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
3304 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
3305 arguments.
3306
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00003307- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
3308 See SF bug #667147.
3309
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003310- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003311 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003312 See SF bug #676155.
3313
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003314- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003315 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003316 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
3317 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
3318 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
3319 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
3320 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
3321 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003322
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003323Extension modules
3324-----------------
3325
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003326- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
3327 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3328 tp_as_number pointer.
3329
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003330- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
3331 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
3332 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
3333 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
3334 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
3335
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003336- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
3337
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00003338- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
3339
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003340- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00003341 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003342 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
3343 patch #678531.)
3344
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00003345- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
3346 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
3347
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00003348- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
3349 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
3350
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00003351- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
3352
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00003353- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
3354 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
3355 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
3356
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003357- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
3358
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003359- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
3360 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
3361
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003362- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003363
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003364- datetime changes:
3365
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00003366 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
3367
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003368 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
3369 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
3370 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
3371 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
3372 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
3373 now.
3374
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003375 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003376 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
3377 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003378
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003379 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003380 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003381 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
3382 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
3383 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
3384 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003385
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003386 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
3387 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
3388 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003389 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
3390
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003391 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
3392 by a later example coded by Guido.
3393
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003394 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003395 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
3396 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
3397 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003398 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
3399 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
3400
3401 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
3402 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
3403 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
3404 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
3405 tzinfo subclass instance.
3406
3407 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
3408 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
3409 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
3410 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
3411 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
3412 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
3413 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
3414 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003415
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003416 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
3417 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3418 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3419 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3420 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003421 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3422
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003423 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003424
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003425 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3426 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3427 as a naive datetime object.
3428
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003429 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3430 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3431 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3432
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003433 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3434 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3435 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3436 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3437 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3438 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3439 comparison.
3440
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003441 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3442 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3443 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3444 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003445 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003446
3447 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003448
3449 and ::
3450
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003451 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3452
3453 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3454 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3455 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3456 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3457
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003458 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3459 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3460 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3461 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3462 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3463
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003464 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3465 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003466 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3467 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003468
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003469Library
3470-------
3471
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003472- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3473 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3474
3475- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3476 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3477 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3478 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3479 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3480 See PEP 307 for details.
3481
3482- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3483 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3484
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003485- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3486 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003487 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003488 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3489 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003490 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003491
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003492- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3493 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3494
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003495- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3496 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3497 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3498
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003499- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3500
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003501- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3502 exception.
3503
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003504- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3505 class.
3506
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003507- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3508 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3509 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3510
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003511- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3512 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3513
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003514- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003515 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3516 See SF bug #659228.
3517
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003518- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3519 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3520 See SF patch #651082.
3521
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003522- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003523
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003524- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3525 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3526
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003527- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003528 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003529
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003530- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3531 DOS paths from other platforms.
3532
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003533Tools/Demos
3534-----------
3535
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003536- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3537 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3538 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3539 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3540 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3541 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3542 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3543 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3544 example:
3545
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003546 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3547 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003548
3549 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3550
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003551
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003552Build
3553-----
3554
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003555- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3556 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3557 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003558 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3559
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003560 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3561
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003562- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3563 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3564 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3565 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3566 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3567 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3568 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3569 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3570 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3571
3572- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3573 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3574 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3575 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3576
3577- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3578 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3579
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003580C API
3581-----
3582
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003583- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3584 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003585
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003586- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3587 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3588 tp_as_number pointer.
3589
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003590- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3591 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3592 (SF #681367)
3593
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003594- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3595 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3596 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3597 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003598
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003599Tests
3600-----
3601
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003602- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003603 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3604 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3605 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3606 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3607 pydoc.)
3608
3609- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3610
3611- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003612
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003613Windows
3614-------
3615
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003616- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3617 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3618 time).
3619
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003620- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3621 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3622
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003623- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3624 release without strong cryptography.
3625
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003626- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003627 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003628
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003629- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3630 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3631
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003632Mac
3633---
3634
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003635- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3636 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003637
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003638- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3639 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3640 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003641
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003642- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3643 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003644
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003645- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3646 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3647 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3648 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003649
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003650- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003651 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3652 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3653 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003654
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003655
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003656What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003657=================================
3658
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003659*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003660
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003661Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003662--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003663
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003664- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3665
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003666- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3667 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003668 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003669 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003670 a different meaning than before.
3671
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003672- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003673 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003674 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003675
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003676- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003677 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003678 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003679
3680- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3681 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3682 and deallocation.
3683
3684- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3685 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3686
3687- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3688 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3689 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3690 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3691 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3692
3693- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3694 now detected by the garbage collector.
3695
3696- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3697 [SF bug 519621]
3698
3699- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3700 identifier.
3701
3702- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3703 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3704 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3705 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3706 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3707 [SF bug 563060]
3708
3709- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3710 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3711 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3712 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3713 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3714
3715- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3716 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3717 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3718
3719- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3720
3721- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3722 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3723 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3724 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3725 state of the slots would be lost.)
3726
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003727Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003728-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003729
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003730- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003731 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3732 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3733 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3734 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003735 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3736 Jython 2.1.
3737
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003738- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003739 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003740 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3741 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3742 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3743 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3744 these, see PEP 302.
3745
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003746- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3747 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3748 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3749
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003750- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3751 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3752 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3753
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003754- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3755 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3756 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3757
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003758- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3759 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3760 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3761 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3762 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3763 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3764 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3765 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3766 releases or implementations.
3767
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003768- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003769 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3770 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003771
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003772- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3773 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3774
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003775- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3776 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3777 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3778
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003779- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3780 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3781
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003782- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3783 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003784 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3785 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003786
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003787- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3788 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3789 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3790 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3791 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3792
3793 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3794 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3795 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3796 pattern.
3797
3798 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3799 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3800 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3801 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3802
3803 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3804 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3805 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3806 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3807 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3808 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3809
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003810- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3811 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3812 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3813 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3814 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3815 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3816 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3817 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003818
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003819- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3820 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3821 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3822 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3823 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003824 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3825 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3826 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3827 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3828 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3829 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3830 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003831
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003832- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3833 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3834
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003835- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3836 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3837 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3838 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3839 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3840 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3841 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3842 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3843 to Zack Weinberg!
3844
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003845- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3846 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3847 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3848 type. This has been fixed now.
3849
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003850- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3851 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3852 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3853
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003854- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3855 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3856 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3857 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3858 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3859 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3860 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3861 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003862 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003863
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003864- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3865 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3866 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003867
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003868- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3869 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3870 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3871 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3872 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3873 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3874 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3875 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003876 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003877 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3878 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3879
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003880- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3881 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3882 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3883 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3884 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3885 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3886 this.)
3887
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003888- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3889 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003890 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003891 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003892 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3893 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003894 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3895 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003896
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003897- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3898 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3899 currently running.
3900
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003901- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3902 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3903 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3904 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3905
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003906- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3907 as directory names.
3908
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003909- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3910 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3911
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003912- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3913 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3914
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003915- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003916 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3917 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003918
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003919- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3920 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3921 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3922 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3923 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3924
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003925- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3926 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3927 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3928 removed.
3929
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003930- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3931 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3932 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3933
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003934- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3935 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3936 to __debug__.
3937
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003938- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3939 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3940 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3941
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003942- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3943 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3944 deprecated now.
3945
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003946- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3947 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3948 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003949
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003950- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3951 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3952 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3953 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3954 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003955
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003956- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3957 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3958
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003959- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3960 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3961 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003962 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003963 is backward compatible.
3964
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003965- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3966 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3967 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3968 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3969 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3970
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003971- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3972 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3973 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3974 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3975 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3976 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003977
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003978- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3979 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3980
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003981- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3982 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3983
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003984- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3985 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3986 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3987 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3988 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3989
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003990- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3991 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3992 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3993
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003994- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003995 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3996
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003997- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3998 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3999 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00004000
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00004001- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
4002 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
4003
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00004004- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
4005 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
4006 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
4007
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00004008- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
4009
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004010Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004011-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004012
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00004013- Added three operators to the operator module:
4014 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
4015 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
4016 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
4017
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00004018- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
4019
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00004020- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
4021 archives.
4022
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004023- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
4024 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
4025 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
4026
4027 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
4028
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00004029- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
4030 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
4031 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00004032 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00004033
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00004034- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
4035 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
4036 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
4037 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00004038 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
4039 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
4040 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
4041 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00004042
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00004043- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
4044 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00004045
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00004046- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
4047
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00004048- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
4049 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
4050
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00004051- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
4052 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
4053 supported.
4054
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00004055- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
4056
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00004057- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
4058 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00004059
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00004060- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
4061 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
4062
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00004063- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
4064
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00004065- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
4066 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
4067
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00004068- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
4069 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
4070 functions but callable type objects.
4071
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004072- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00004073 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004074 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00004075
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00004076- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
4077 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00004078
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00004079- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
4080 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00004081
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00004082- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
4083 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
4084 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
4085 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
4086
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00004087- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
4088 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00004089
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00004090- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
4091 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
4092 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
4093 and __imul__.
4094
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00004095- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00004096 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
4097 is called.
4098
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00004099- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
4100 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
4101 interpreter was compiled.
4102
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00004103- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
4104 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
4105 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004106 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00004107 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
4108 1, not 2.
4109
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00004110- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
4111 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
4112 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
4113 limit.
4114
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00004115- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
4116 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
4117 bug #623464.
4118
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00004119- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
4120 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
4121 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
4122 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
4123
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004124Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004125-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004126
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00004127- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
4128
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00004129- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
4130 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
4131 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
4132 with Python 2.3a2.
4133
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00004134- os.path exposes getctime.
4135
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004136- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004137 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004138 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004139 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004140 unit tests of floating point results.
4141
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00004142- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
4143 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
4144 has been increased.
4145
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00004146- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
4147 executed.
4148
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00004149- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
4150 postinstallation script.
4151
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00004152- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
4153 test the current module.
4154
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004155- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00004156 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
4157 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
4158 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
4159 this behavior needs to be controlled.
4160
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00004161- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00004162 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00004163 Ward's Optik package.
4164
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00004165- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
4166 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
4167 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
4168 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
4169
4170- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
4171 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00004172 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00004173
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00004174- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
4175 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
4176 shelf are binary pickles.
4177
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00004178- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
4179 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
4180
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00004181- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
4182 modules are iterators now.
4183
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00004184- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
4185 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
4186 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
4187 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
4188 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
4189 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004190
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00004191- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
4192 with their entity value.
4193
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00004194- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
4195
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004196- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
4197 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00004198
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004199- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
4200 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004201 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00004202
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00004203- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
4204 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
4205 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
4206 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
4207 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
4208 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
4209 main():
4210
4211 import locale
4212 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
4213
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00004214- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
4215 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
4216
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00004217- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
4218 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
4219 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
4220 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
4221 to the new standard.
4222
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00004223- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
4224 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
4225 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
4226 an extension to the database.
4227
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004228- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
4229 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
4230 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
4231 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00004232 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004233
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004234- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00004235 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004236
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00004237- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
4238 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
4239 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
4240 bounded integers.
4241
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00004242- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
4243 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
4244 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
4245 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
4246 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
4247 in existence.
4248
4249 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
4250 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
4251 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
4252 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
4253 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
4254 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
4255
4256 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
4257 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
4258 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
4259 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
4260
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00004261- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
4262 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
4263 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
4264
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00004265- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
4266
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004267- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
4268 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
4269 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
4270 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
4271
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00004272- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
4273 argument.
4274
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00004275- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
4276 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
4277 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
4278 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
4279 [SF patch 560794].
4280
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004281- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
4282 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
4283 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00004284 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
4285 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
4286 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004287
4288- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
4289 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00004290
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00004291- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
4292 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
4293 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
4294 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00004295
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00004296- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
4297 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
4298 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
4299 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
4300 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
4301
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004302- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00004303
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00004304- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
4305
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00004306- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
4307 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
4308 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
4309 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
4310 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
4311 identical to None.
4312
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00004313- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
4314 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
4315 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
4316 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
4317 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
4318 results now.
4319
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00004320- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
4321 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
4322
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004323- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
4324 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
4325 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
4326 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
4327 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
4328 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
4329 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
4330 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
4331
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00004332- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
4333
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00004334- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
4335 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
4336
4337- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
4338 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
4339 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
4340 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
4341 and other systems.
4342
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004343- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
4344 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
4345 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
4346 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 +00004347 work well with these.
4348
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00004349- compileall now supports quiet operation.
4350
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004351- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00004352 connections.
4353
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00004354- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
4355 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
4356 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
4357
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00004358- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
4359 sets
4360
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00004361- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
4362 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
4363 name.
4364
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00004365- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
4366 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
4367 passed in.
4368
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004369- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00004370 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00004371 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
4372 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00004373
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00004374- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
4375
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00004376- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
4377
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00004378- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
4379 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
4380 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
4381
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004382- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
4383 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
4384 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
4385 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00004386 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004387
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004388- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004389 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004390 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004391
4392- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
4393 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
4394 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
4395
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004396- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00004397 the value of its expression argument.
4398
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004399- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
4400 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
4401 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
4402
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00004403- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
4404 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
4405 skipstone browser was included.
4406
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00004407- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
4408 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
4409
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004410Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004411-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004412
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00004413- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
4414 names in addition to accepting file names.
4415
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00004416- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
4417 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4418 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4419 still used and useful.)
4420
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004421- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4422 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4423 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4424 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004425
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004426- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4427 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4428 the generated binary.
4429
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004430Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004431-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004432
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004433- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4434
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004435- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4436 except in the hands of experts.
4437
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004438- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004439 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4440 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4441 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004442
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004443- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4444 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4445 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4446 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4447 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4448 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4449 builds.
4450
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004451- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4452 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4453 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4454 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4455 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4456 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4457 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4458 new type.
4459
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004460- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004461
4462 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4463 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4464 positive infinities.
4465
4466 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4467 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4468 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4469 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4470 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4471 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4472 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4473
4474 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4475
4476 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4477
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004478- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4479 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4480 size of the executable.
4481
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004482- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4483 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4484 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4485 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004486
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004487- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4488
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004489- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4490 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4491 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004492
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004493- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4494 well as Unix.
4495
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004496- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4497 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4498 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4499 modules in the README file for details.
4500
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004501C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004502-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004503
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004504- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4505 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004506 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004507 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004508 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004509
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004510- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4511 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4512 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4513 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4514 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4515 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004516 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004517 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4518 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4519 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4520 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4521 aligned.)
4522
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004523- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4524 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4525 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4526
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004527- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4528 level.
4529
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004530- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4531 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4532 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4533 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4534 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4535
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004536- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4537 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4538 code.
4539
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004540- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4541 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4542 adjusting for negative indices.
4543
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004544- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4545 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4546 object.
4547
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004548- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4549 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4550 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4551
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004552- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4553 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004554
4555- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4556
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004557- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4558 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4559 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4560 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4561
4562- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4563
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004564- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004565
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004566- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004567 without going through the buffer API.
4568
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004569- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004570
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004571- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4572 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4573 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4574 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4575
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004576- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4577 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4578
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004579- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004580 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4581
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004582New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004583-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004584
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004585- OpenVMS is now supported.
4586
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004587- AtheOS is now supported.
4588
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004589- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4590
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004591- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4592
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004593Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004594-----
4595
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004596- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4597 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4598 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004599
4600Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004601-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004602
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004603- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4604 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4605 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4606 bugs.
4607 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004608 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004609 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4610 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004611 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004612
4613- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004614 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004615
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004616- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4617 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4618
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004619- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4620 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004621 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004622 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4623
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004624- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4625 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4626 use files" uninstall option).
4627
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004628- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4629
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004630- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4631 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4632
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004633- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4634 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4635 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4636
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004637- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4638 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4639 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4640 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4641 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004642 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4643 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4644 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004645
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004646- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004647 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004648 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4649 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4650 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4651 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4652 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4653 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4654 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4655 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4656 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4657 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4658 work around.
4659
4660- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4661 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4662 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4663 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4664 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4665 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4666 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4667 specified with O_CREAT too).
4668
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004669Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004670----
4671
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004672- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004673
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004674- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4675 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4676 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4677
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004678- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4679 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4680 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4681
4682- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4683 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4684 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4685 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4686 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4687 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4688 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4689 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004690
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004691- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4692 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4693 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004694
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004695- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4696 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4697 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4698 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4699 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004700
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004701- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4702 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4703 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004704
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004705- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4706 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004707
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004708- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4709 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4710 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4711 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4712 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004713
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004714- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4715 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4716 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4717
4718- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4719 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4720 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004721
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004722- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4723 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4724 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4725 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004726 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004727
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004728- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4729 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004730
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004731- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4732 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004733
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004734- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004735 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004736 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4737 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004738
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004739
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004740What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004741===============================
4742
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004743*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4744
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004745Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004746--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004747
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004748- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4749 with a custom metaclass.
4750
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004751Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004752-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004753
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004754- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4755 are proxies.
4756
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004757Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004758-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004759
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004760- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4761 very short strings.
4762
4763- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4764 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4765 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4766 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4767 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4768
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004769Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004770-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004771
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004772- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4773 close or delete time).
4774
4775- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4776 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4777
4778- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4779
4780- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004781 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004782
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004783Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004784-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004785
4786Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004787-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004788
4789C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004790-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004791
4792New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004793-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004794
4795Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004796-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004797
4798Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004799-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004800
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004801- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4802
4803- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4804 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4805
4806- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4807 deleted at process exit time.
4808
4809- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4810 in backslash.
4811
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004812Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004813----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004814
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004815- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4816 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4817 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4818
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004819
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004820What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004821===========================
4822
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004823*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4824
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004825Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004826--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004827
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004828- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4829 been extensively updated. See
4830
4831 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4832
4833 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4834
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004835- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4836 deleted!
4837
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004838- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4839 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4840 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4841 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4842 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4843
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004844- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4845
4846 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4847 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4848
4849 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4850 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4851 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4852 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4853 supported anyway.
4854
4855 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4856 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4857
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004858- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4859 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4860 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4861 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4862 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004863
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004864- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4865 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4866 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4867
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004868Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004869-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004870
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004871- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4872 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4873 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4874 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4875 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4876 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004877 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4878 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4879 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4880 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004881
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004882- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4883 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4884 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4885
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004886Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004887-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004888
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004889- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4890
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004891Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004892-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004893
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004894- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4895 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4896 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4897 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4898 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4899 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4900
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004901- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4902
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004903- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4904
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004905- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4906
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004907- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4908 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4909 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4910
4911- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4912
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004913Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004914-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004915
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004916- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4917 off a search on Google.
4918
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004919Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004920-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004921
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004922- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4923 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4924 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4925 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4926 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4927 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4928 other platforms should do likewise.
4929
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004930- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4931 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4932 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4933
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004934C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004935-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004936
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004937- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4938 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4939 producing key-value pairs.
4940
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004941- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004942 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004943 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4944 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4945 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4946 previously went unchallenged.
4947
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004948New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004949-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004950
4951Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004952-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004953
4954Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004955-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004956
4957Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004958----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004959
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004960- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4961 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004962
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004963- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4964 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4965 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4966 home.
4967
4968
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004969What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004970===========================
4971
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004972*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4973
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004974Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004975--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004976
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004977- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4978 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004979
4980 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004981 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004982
4983 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4984 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004985 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004986 This needs to be documented.
4987
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004988- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4989 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4990
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004991- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4992 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4993 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4994
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004995- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4996 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4997
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004998- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4999 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
5000 class forbids it).
5001
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00005002- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
5003 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
5004 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
5005
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00005006- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
5007
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005008Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005009-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005010
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00005011- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
5012 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005013 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00005014
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00005015- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
5016 (like 1 + '').
5017
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005018Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005019-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005020
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00005021- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
5022 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
5023 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
5024 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005025 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00005026 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
5027
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00005028- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
5029 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
5030 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
5031 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
5032
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00005033- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
5034 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00005035 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
5036 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
5037 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00005038
5039- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
5040 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00005041
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00005042- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
5043 bytes on its input.
5044
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005045Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005046-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005047
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00005048- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00005049 convenience function.
5050
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00005051- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
5052 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
5053 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005054 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
5055 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
5056 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
5057 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
5058 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
5059 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00005060
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00005061- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
5062 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
5063 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
5064 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
5065
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00005066- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
5067 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
5068 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
5069
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00005070- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
5071 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
5072 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
5073 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
5074
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005075- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
5076 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005077 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005078 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
5079 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
5080 new -l and -e options.
5081
5082- statcache is now deprecated.
5083
5084- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
5085 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005086 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005087 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
5088 time properly taken into account.
5089
5090- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
5091 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
5092 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
5093 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
5094
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005095Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005096-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005097
5098Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005099-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005100
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005101- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
5102 is built with libdb3 if available.
5103
5104- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
5105
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005106C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005107-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005108
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00005109- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
5110 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
5111 PySequence_Size().
5112
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005113- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
5114
5115- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
5116 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
5117 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
5118
5119- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
5120 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
5121
5122- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
5123 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
5124
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005125New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005126-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005127
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00005128- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
5129 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
5130
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00005131- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
5132 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
5133
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00005134- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
5135
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005136Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005137-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005138
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00005139- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
5140 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
5141
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005142Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005143-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005144
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005145Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005146----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005147
5148- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
5149 removed completely in the next release.
5150
5151- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
5152 OSX.
5153
5154- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
5155 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
5156
5157- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
5158
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005159
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005160What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005161===========================
5162
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005163*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
5164
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005165Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005166--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005167
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005168- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005169 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005170 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005171 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
5172 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005173 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
5174 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005175 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
5176 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00005177
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00005178- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
5179 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
5180
5181- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
5182 class methods, static methods, and properties.
5183
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005184Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005185-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005186
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00005187- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
5188 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
5189 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
5190 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
5191 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
5192 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
5193 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
5194 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
5195
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005196- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
5197 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
5198 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
5199 example).
5200
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005201- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005202 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005203 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005204 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005205
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005206- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
5207 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
5208 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00005209 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005210
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005211- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
5212 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
5213 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
5214 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
5215 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
5216 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
5217
5218 isinstance(x, (A, B))
5219
5220 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
5221
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005222Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005223-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005224
5225- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
5226
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005227- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
5228
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005229- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
5230 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00005231
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005232- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
5233 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
5234 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
5235 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
5236 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
5237 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00005238 attributes.
5239
5240- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
5241 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
5242 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00005243
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005244- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
5245 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
5246 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005247
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005248- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
5249 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
5250 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005251 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
5252 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
5253
5254- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
5255 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005256
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005257Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005258-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005259
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00005260- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
5261 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
5262
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005263- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
5264 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
5265 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
5266 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
5267
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00005268- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
5269 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
5270 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
5271 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
5272
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00005273 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
5274 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
5275 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
5276 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
5277 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
5278 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
5279 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
5280 without losing information).
5281
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005282- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005283 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
5284 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
5285 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
5286 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
5287 module).
5288
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00005289 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005290 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
5291 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
5292 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
5293 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005294
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005295- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00005296 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
5297 encoding.
5298
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00005299- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
5300 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
5301
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005302- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005303 to allow saving the message body to a file.
5304
5305- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
5306 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
5307 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
5308 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
5309
5310- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
5311
5312- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
5313 ON, and OFF.
5314
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005315- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
5316 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
5317
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005318Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005319-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005320
5321- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
5322 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
5323 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005324
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005325- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
5326 been added: -X and -E.
5327
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005328Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005329-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005330
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005331- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
5332 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
5333
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005334C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005335-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005336
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00005337- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
5338 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
5339 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
5340 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
5341 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
5342
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00005343- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
5344 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
5345 as long) arguments.
5346
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005347- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
5348 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
5349 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
5350 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
5351 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
5352 report any bugs or strange behavior).
5353
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005354- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
5355 input.
5356
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005357New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005358-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005359
5360Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005361-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005362
5363Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005364-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005365
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00005366- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
5367 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
5368 is created for .py and .pyw files.
5369
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005370- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
5371 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
5372 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005373 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005374
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005375 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
5376 # (SIGINT) behavior.
5377 import signal
5378 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005379
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005380 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005381 while 1:
5382 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005383 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005384 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
5385 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
5386 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
5387 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005388
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005389
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005390What's New in Python 2.2a4?
5391===========================
5392
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005393*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
5394
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005395Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005396--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005397
5398- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
5399 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
5400 documentation for all operations on list objects.
5401
5402- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
5403 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
5404 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
5405 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
5406 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
5407 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
5408 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005409
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005410- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005411 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005412 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
5413 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
5414 associate a docstring with a property.
5415
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005416- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
5417 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5418 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5419 other built-in object types.
5420
5421- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5422 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5423 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5424 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5425 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5426
5427- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5428 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5429
5430- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5431 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005432 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005433 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5434 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5435 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5436 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5437 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5438
5439- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5440 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5441 class.
5442
5443- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5444 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5445 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5446 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5447
5448- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5449 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5450 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5451 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5452
5453- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5454 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5455
5456- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5457 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5458 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5459 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5460 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005461 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005462 with the same value as s.
5463
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005464- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5465
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005466Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005467----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005468
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005469- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5470
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005471- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5472 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5473 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5474 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5475 objects.
5476
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005477- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5478 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005479 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5480 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5481
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005482- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5483 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5484 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5485
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005486Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005487-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005488
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005489- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5490 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5491 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5492 by the instances.
5493
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005494- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5495 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5496 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5497
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005498- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5499 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5500 before the entire comparison is complete.
5501
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005502- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5503 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5504 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5505
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005506- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5507 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5508 getwriter().
5509
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005510- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5511 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5512
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005513- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005514 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5515 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5516
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005517- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5518 iterable object.
5519
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005520- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5521 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005522
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005523- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5524 authentication.
5525
5526- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5527 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005528
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005529- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005530 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5531 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5532 a sample driver.)
5533
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005534Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005535-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005536
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005537- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5538 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5539 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5540 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5541 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5542 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5543 kernel has large file support.
5544
5545- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5546 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5547 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5548 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5549 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5550
5551- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5552 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5553 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5554
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005555C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005556-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005557
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005558- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5559 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5560
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005561New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005562-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005563
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005564- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5565 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5566
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005567Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005568-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005569
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005570- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5571 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5572 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5573 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5574 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5575
5576- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5577 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5578 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5579 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5580
5581- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5582 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5583
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005584Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005585-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005586
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005587- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005588 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5589 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005590
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005591
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005592What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5593===========================
5594
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005595*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5596
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005597Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005598----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005599
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005600- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5601 big to represent as a C double.
5602
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005603- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5604 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5605 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5606 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5607 restriction).
5608
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005609- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5610 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5611 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5612 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5613 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5614
5615 >>> dir([])
5616 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5617 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5618 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5619 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5620 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5621 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5622 'reverse', 'sort']
5623
5624 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5625
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005626- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005627 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5628 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5629 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5630 OverflowError exception.
5631
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005632- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005633 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005634 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5635 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5636 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5637 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5638 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005639 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005640 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5641 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5642
5643 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5644 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5645 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5646 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005647
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005648- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005649 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5650 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5651 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5652 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5653 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5654 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5655 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5656 once it is created.
5657
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005658- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5659 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5660 (key, value) pairs.
5661
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005662- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005663 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5664 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5665
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005666- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5667 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5668 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5669 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5670 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005671
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005672- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005673 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5674 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5675
5676 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5677
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005678- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005679 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5680
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005681Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005682-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005683
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005684- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005685 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5686 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005687
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005688- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5689 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5690 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5691 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5692 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5693 in this area anymore).
5694
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005695- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5696 threading.Timer.
5697
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005698- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5699 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5700
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005701- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005702 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5703
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005704- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005705 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5706 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5707 converted to Python longs.
5708
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005709- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005710 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5711
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005712- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5713 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5714 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5715
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005716Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005717-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005718
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005719- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5720 division operators as per PEP 238.
5721
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005722Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005723-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005724
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005725- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5726 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5727 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5728 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5729
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005730C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005731-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005732
5733- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005734
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005735- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5736 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005737 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005738
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005739 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5740 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005741 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005742 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005743
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005744- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005745 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5746 module:
5747
5748 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005749
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005750 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5751 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005752
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005753 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5754 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005755
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005756 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5757
5758 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5759
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005760- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005761 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5762 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5763 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005764
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005765New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005766-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005767
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005768- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5769 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5770 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5771 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5772 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005773
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005774Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005775-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005776
5777Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005778-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005779
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005780- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5781 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5782 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5783 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005784 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5785 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5786 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5787 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5788 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005789
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005790- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005791 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5792
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005793
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005794What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5795===========================
5796
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005797*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5798
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005799Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005800-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005801
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005802- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5803 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5804
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005805- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5806 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5807 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005808
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005809- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5810 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5811 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5812 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005813
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005814- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5815
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005816- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005817
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005818Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005819-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005820
5821- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005822 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005823 the module docstring for details.
5824
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005825Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005826-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005827
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005828- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005829 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5830 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5831 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005832
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005833- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5834 Nick Mathewson.
5835
5836Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005837----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005838
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005839- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5840 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5841 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5842 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5843 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5844 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5845 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5846 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5847
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005848- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5849 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5850 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5851 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5852
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005853- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5854 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5855 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5856 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5857 come a long way).
5858
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005859- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5860 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5861 write filters for these warnings).
5862
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005863- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5864 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5865 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5866 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5867 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5868
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005869- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5870 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5871 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5872 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5873 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5874 older distribution.
5875
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005876Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005877-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005878
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005879- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5880 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005881 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005882
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005883- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5884 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5885 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5886
5887- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5888
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005889- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5890
5891- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5892
5893- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5894
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005895- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005896
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005897- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5898
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005899New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005900-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005901
5902C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005903-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005904
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005905- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5906 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5907 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5908 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5909 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5910 against buffer overruns.
5911
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005912- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005913 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5914 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005915 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5916 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5917 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5918
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005919- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5920 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5921 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5922 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5923 deprecated.
5924
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005925Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005926-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005927
5928- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5929 relevant is found.
5930
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005931
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005932What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005933===========================
5934
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005935*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5936
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005937Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005938----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005939
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005940- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5941 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5942 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5943 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5944 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5945 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5946 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5947 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005948 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005949 repaired.
5950
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005951- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005952 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005953 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5954 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5955 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5956 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5957 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5958 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5959 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5960 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5961
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005962- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5963 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5964 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5965 leading BMO character).
5966
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005967- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5968 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5969 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5970
5971 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5972 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5973 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005974
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005975 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5976 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5977 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5978 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5979 for various simple to use conversions.
5980
5981 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5982 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5983
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005984 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5985 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5986 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5987 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5988 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5989 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5990 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5991 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5992 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5993 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5994 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5995 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5996 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5997 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5998 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005999
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00006000- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
6001 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
6002 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00006003 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00006004 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00006005
6006 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00006007 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
6008 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
6009 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
6010 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
6011 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006012 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
6013 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00006014
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006015 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
6016 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
6017 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00006018 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00006019
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00006020- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
6021 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
6022 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
6023 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
6024 floating arithmetic,
6025
6026 x = 9007199254740992.0
6027 print long(x)
6028
6029 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
6030 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
6031 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
6032 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
6033 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
6034 functions are of good quality).
6035
6036 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
6037 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
6038 algorithms to break.
6039
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00006040- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
6041 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
6042 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
6043 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
6044 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
6045 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
6046 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
6047 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
6048 order.
6049
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00006050- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
6051 operation along the most common code paths.
6052
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00006053- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
6054 the same as dict.has_key(x).
6055
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00006056- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
6057 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
6058 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
6059 {}.update(UserDict())
6060
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00006061- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
6062 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
6063 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
6064 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
6065 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
6066 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
6067 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
6068 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
6069
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00006070- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00006071 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006072
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00006073 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00006074 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
6075 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00006076 join() method of strings
6077 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00006078 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
6079 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006080 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00006081 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00006082
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00006083- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
6084 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
6085
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00006086- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
6087 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
6088
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00006089- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
6090 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
6091 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
6092 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
6093
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00006094- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
6095 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00006096 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00006097 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
6098 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00006099
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00006100- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
6101
6102
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006103Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006104-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006105
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00006106- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006107 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00006108 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
6109 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
6110
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00006111- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
6112 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
6113
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00006114- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
6115 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
6116 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
6117 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
6118
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00006119- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
6120 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
6121 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
6122
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00006123- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
6124
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00006125- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
6126
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00006127- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
6128 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
6129 that are still imported into string.py).
6130
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006131- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
6132
6133- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
6134 Now it does.
6135
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00006136- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
6137
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00006138- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
6139 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
6140 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
6141 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
6142 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00006143 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
6144 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00006145
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00006146- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
6147 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
6148 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
6149 'help(object)'.
6150
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006151Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006152-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006153
6154- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006155 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006156 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
6157 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
6158
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006159- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00006160 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
6161 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006162
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00006163C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006164-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00006165
6166- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
6167 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006168
6169----
6170
6171**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**