blob: 1d919aa50ba2318a1c015a83fae2d6d1ab3152f8 [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10Core and builtins
11-----------------
12
Martin v. Löwis13a1fde2005-01-27 18:56:16 +000013- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +000014 an ferror() call.
15
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +000016- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
17 list.sort().
18
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +000019- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
20 (2+3) --> (5).
21
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +000022- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
23
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000024
25Extension Modules
26-----------------
27
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +000028- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
29 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +000030
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +000031- stat_float_times is now True.
32
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +000033- array.array objects are now picklable.
34
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +000035- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
36 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
37
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +000038- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
39 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
40 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
41
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +000042- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
43 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000044
45Library
46-------
47
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +000048- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
49
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +000050- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
51
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +000052- Enhancements to the csv module:
53
54 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
55 reflecting it's capabilities, and improving it's compliance with
56 PEP 305.
57 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
58 reporting.
59 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
60 dictates.
61 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +000062 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +000063 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +000064 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
65 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +000066 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
67 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +000068 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +000069 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
70 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
71 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
72 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
73 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
74 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
75 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
76 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
77 without first creating a dialect class.
78 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
79 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
80 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +000081 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +000082 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
83 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +000084 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
85 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
86 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
87 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +000088 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
89 This has been fixed.
90
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +000091- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
92 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
93 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
94 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
95
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +000096- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
97
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +000098- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
99 (Bug #951915).
100
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000101- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
102 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
103 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
104 encoding alias table
105
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000106- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
107
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000108- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
109 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
110
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000111- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
112
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000113- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
114
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000115- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
116
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000117- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
118
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000119- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
120
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000121- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
122 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
123 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
124
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000125- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000126 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000127
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000128- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
129 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
130 tokenizer with very long source lines.
131
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000132- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
133 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
134
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000135- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
136 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000137
138Build
139-----
140
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000141- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
142 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
143 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
144 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
145 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
146 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
147 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
148 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
149
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000150
151C API
152-----
153
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000154- Removed PyRange_New().
155
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000156
157Tests
158-----
159
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000160- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000161
162Mac
163---
164
165
166
167Tools/Demos
168-----------
169
170
171
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000172What's New in Python 2.4 final?
173===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000174
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000175*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000176
177Core and builtins
178-----------------
179
180- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
181 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
182 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
183
184
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000185What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
186==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000187
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000188*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000189
190Core and builtins
191-----------------
192
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000193- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
194 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
195 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
196
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000197
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000198Library
199-------
200
201- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
202 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
203 raised is re-raised.
204
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000205- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
206 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
207
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000208- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
209 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
210 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
211 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
212 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
213 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
214 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
215 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
216 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
217 by the slice are recomputed now.
218
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000219- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000220
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000221Build
222-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000223
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000224- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
225 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
226 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000227
228C API
229-----
230
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000231- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
232
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000233
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000234What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
235================================
236
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000237*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000238
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000239License
240-------
241
242The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
243is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
244changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
245Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
246intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
247durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
248the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
249License::
250
251 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
252
253says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
254to Python 2.1.1.
255
256The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
257License Version 2.
258
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000259Core and builtins
260-----------------
261
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000262- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
263 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
264 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
265 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
266 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
267 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
268 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
269 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
270 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
271 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
272
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000273- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000274
275Extension Modules
276-----------------
277
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000278- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
279 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
280 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
281 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000282
283Library
284-------
285
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000286- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
287 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
288 returned.
289
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000290- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
291
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000292- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
293 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
294
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000295- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
296
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000297- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
298 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000299
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000300- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
301
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000302- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
303
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000304- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000305 the source code is updated and reloaded.
306
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000307Build
308-----
309
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000310- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000311
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000312What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
313================================
314
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000315*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000316
317Core and builtins
318-----------------
319
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000320- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000321 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
322
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000323- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
324 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
325 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
326 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
327
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000328- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
329 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
330
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000331- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
332 constant.
333
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000334- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
335 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
336 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
337 large), and to anomalies such as
338 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
339 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
340 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
341 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000342
343Extension modules
344-----------------
345
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000346- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
347 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000348 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
349 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
350 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000351
352Library
353-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000354
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000355- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000356 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000357 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
358 --swig-cpp.
359
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000360- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
361 it is set.
362
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000363- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000364
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000365- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
366 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
367 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
368 Closes bug #1039270.
369
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000370- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000371
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000372 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000373 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
374 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
375 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
376 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
377 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
378 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
379 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
380 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
381 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
382 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
383 + Updates to documentation.
384
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000385- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
386 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
387 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
388 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
389
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000390- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000391
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000392- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
393 applications should use the getmember function.
394
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000395- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
396
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000397- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
398 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
399 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
400 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
401 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
402 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
403 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
404 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
405 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
406
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000407- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
408 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000409 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000410
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000411- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
412 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
413 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
414 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
415 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
416 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
417 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
418 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000419
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000420- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
421 the new public features (of which there are many).
422
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000423- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000424 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
425 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
426 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
427 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000428 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000429
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000430- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
431
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000432- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
433 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
434 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
435 options.
436
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000437- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
438 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
439 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
440 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
441 conditions under which non-string values work.
442
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000443Build
444-----
445
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000446- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
447 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
448 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
449
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000450- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
451 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
452 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
453 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
454 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000455
456C API
457-----
458
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000459- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
460 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
461
462- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
463
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000464- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
465 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
466 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
467 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
468 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
469 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
470 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
471 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
472 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
473
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000474- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
475
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000476- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
477 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
478 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000479
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000480Tests
481-----
482
483- test__locale ported to unittest
484
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000485Mac
486---
487
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000488- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
489 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
490 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000491
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000492Tools/Demos
493-----------
494
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000495- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
496 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
497 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
498 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
499 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000500
501
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000502What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
503=================================
504
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000505*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000506
507Core and builtins
508-----------------
509
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000510- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000511 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
512
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000513- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
514 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
515 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
516 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
517 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
518 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
519 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
520 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000521 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
522 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
523 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
524 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
525 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000526
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000527- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
528 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
529 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
530 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
531 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
532
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000533- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
534
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000535- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
536 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
537
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000538- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
539 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
540 modified the list.
541
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000542- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
543 functions is now writable.
544
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000545- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
546 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
547 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
548 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
549
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000550- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
551 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
552 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
553 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
554 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000555
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000556- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
557 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
558
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000559Extension modules
560-----------------
561
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000562- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
563
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000564- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
565 data.
566
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000567- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
568 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
569 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
570 supposed to have been truncated away.
571
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000572- Added socket.socketpair().
573
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000574- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
575 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
576
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000577- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000578 versions of Python, have now been removed.
579
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000580Library
581-------
582
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000583- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000584 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000585
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000586- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
587 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
588
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000589- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
590 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
591
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000592- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
593
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000594- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
595 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000596
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000597- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
598 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
599
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000600- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
601
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000602- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
603
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000604- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
605
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000606- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
607 Percivall.
608
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000609- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
610 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
611
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000612- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
613 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
614 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000615 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000616
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000617- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
618 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
619 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
620 and exponent.
621
622- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
623
624- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
625 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
626 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
627
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000628- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
629 to the readline module.
630
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000631- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000632 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
633 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000634
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000635- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
636 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
637 contains symlinks.
638
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000639- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
640 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
641
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000642- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
643 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
644 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
645
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000646- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
647 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
648 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
649 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
650 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
651 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
652 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
653 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
654 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
655 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
656 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
657 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
658 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
659
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000660- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
661
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000662Tools/Demos
663-----------
664
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000665- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
666 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
667
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000668- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
669
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000670Build
671-----
672
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000673- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
674 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
675 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
676 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
677 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
678 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
679 plans to do so.
680
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000681- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
682 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
683
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000684- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
685 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
686
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000687- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
688 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
689
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000690- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
691 GNU/k*BSD systems.
692
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000693- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
694 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
695
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000696C API
697-----
698
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000699..
700
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000701Documentation
702-------------
703
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000704- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
705 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
706
707- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
708 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
709 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000710
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000711New platforms
712-------------
713
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000714- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
715
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000716Tests
717-----
718
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000719..
720
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000721Windows
722-------
723
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000724- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
725 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
726 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
727 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
728 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
729 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
730 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
731 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
732 the problem.
733
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000734Mac
735---
736
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000737..
738
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000739
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000740What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
741=================================
742
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000743*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000744
745Core and builtins
746-----------------
747
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000748- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
749 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
750 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
751 sensitive code.
752
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000753- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000754 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000755
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000756 @staticmethod
757 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000758
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000759 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000760
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000761- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
762 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
763 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
764 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
765 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
766 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
767 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
768 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
769 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
770 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
771 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
772
773 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
774 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
775 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
776 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
777 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
778 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
779 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
780
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000781- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
782 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
783
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000784- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000785 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000786
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000787- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000788 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000789 which was missing for no apparent reason.
790
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000791- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000792 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
793 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
794
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000795- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
796 types that support garbage collection.
797
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000798- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
799
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000800- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
801 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
802 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
803 Jython.
804
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000805- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
806
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000807- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
808 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
809
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000810- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
811 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
812 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000813
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000814- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
815 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
816 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
817
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000818Extension modules
819-----------------
820
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000821- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
822
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000823Library
824-------
825
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000826- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
827 TIS-620
828
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000829- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
830 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
831 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
832 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
833 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
834 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
835 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
836 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
837 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
838 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
839
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000840- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
841
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000842- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
843 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
844 same as when the argument is omitted).
845 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
846
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000847- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
848
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000849- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
850 schemes are offered.
851
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000852- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
853
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000854- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
855 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
856 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
857
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000858- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
859
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000860- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
861 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
862
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000863- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
864 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
865 when dummy_threading is being used.
866
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000867- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
868 from a tarfile.
869
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000870- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000871 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000872
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000873- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
874 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
875 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
876 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
877
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000878- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
879 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
880
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000881- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
882 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
883 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
884 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
885 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
886 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
887 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
888 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
889 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
890 by some other method in progress).
891
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000892- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
893 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
894 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000895
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000896- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
897
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000898- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
899 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
900 AM Kuchling.
901
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000902- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
903 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
904 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
905
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000906- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
907 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
908 instead of unsigned.
909
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000910- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000911 no longer part of the public API.
912
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000913- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
914 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
915 string methods of the same name).
916
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000917- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000918 SF patch 945642.
919
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000920- doctest unittest integration improvements:
921
922 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
923
924 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
925 DocTestSuites.
926
927- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
928 that provide thread-local data.
929
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000930- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
931 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
932
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000933- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
934
935- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
936 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
937 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
938
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000939- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
940
941 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
942 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
943 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000944
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000945 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
946 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
947 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
948 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
949
950 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
951 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
952
953 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
954 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
955 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
956 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
957
958 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
959 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
960 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
961 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
962 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
963
964 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
965 wrapping help output.
966
967 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
968 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
969 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000970
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000971C API
972-----
973
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000974- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
975 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
976 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
977 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
978 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
979 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
980 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
981 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
982 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
983 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
984 its visible semantics have not changed.
985
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000986- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
987 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
988
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000989Documentation
990-------------
991
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000992- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000993
994 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +0000995 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000996
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +0000997 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000998
999 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1000
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001001- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001002
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001003Tests
1004-----
1005
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001006- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001007 platforms that use the Makefile.
1008
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001009- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1010 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1011 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1012
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001013
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001014What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1015=================================
1016
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001017*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001018
1019Core and builtins
1020-----------------
1021
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001022- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1023 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1024 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1025 objects now (one object instead of three).
1026
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001027- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1028 Windows DLLs.
1029
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001030- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1031 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001032
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001033- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1034 a new .pyc magic.
1035
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001036- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1037 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1038 be there.
1039
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001040- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1041 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1042 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1043
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001044- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1045 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1046 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1047
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001048- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1049
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001050- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1051 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1052 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001053
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001054- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1055 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1056
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001057- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1058
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001059- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001060 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001061
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001062- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1063
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001064- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1065
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001066- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1067 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1068
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001069- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1070 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1071 Fixes bug #858016 .
1072
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001073- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1074 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1075 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1076
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001077- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1078 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1079 improves their performance (about 35%).
1080
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001081- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1082 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1083 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1084
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001085- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1086 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1087 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1088 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1089
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001090- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1091 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
1092 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
1093 length is not known).
1094
1095- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1096 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001097 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1098 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001099 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1100
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001101- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1102 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1103
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001104- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1105 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1106 keyword arguments.
1107
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001108- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1109 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1110 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1111
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001112- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1113 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1114 cases.
1115
1116- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1117 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1118 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1119 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1120 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1121 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1122 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1123 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1124 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1125 a release build.
1126
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001127- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1128 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1129
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001130- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001131 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001132
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001133- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1134 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1135 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1136 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1137 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1138 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1139 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1140 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1141 destroyed.
1142
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001143- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1144 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1145 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1146 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1147 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1148 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1149 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1150 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1151
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001152- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1153 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1154 character other than a space.
1155
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001156- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1157 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1158 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1159 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1160 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1161 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1162 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1163 attributes with the same name.
1164
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001165- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1166 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1167 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1168 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1169 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1170 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1171 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1172 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1173 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1174 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1175 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1176 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1177 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1178 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001179
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001180- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1181 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1182 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1183 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1184 This has been repaired.
1185
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001186- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1187
1188- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1189
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001190- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1191 over a sequence.
1192
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001193- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001194 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001195
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001196- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1197
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001198- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1199 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1200 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1201 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1202 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1203 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1204 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1205 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1206
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001207- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1208 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1209 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1210
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001211- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1212 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1213 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1214 freelist.
1215
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001216- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1217 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1218
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001219- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1220 number.
1221
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001222- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1223 a TypeError exception.
1224
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001225- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1226 820195.
1227
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001228- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1229 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1230 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1231
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001232- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001233 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1234 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001235
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001236- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1237 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1238 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1239
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001240- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1241 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001242 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001243
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001244- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001245 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1246 the first call.
1247
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001248
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001249Extension modules
1250-----------------
1251
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001252- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1253 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1254
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001255- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1256 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1257 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1258 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1259 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1260 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1261 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001262
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001263- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1264
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001265- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1266
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001267- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1268 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1269
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001270- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1271 fewer false positives.
1272
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001273- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1274 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1275
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001276- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001277 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1278
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001279- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001280 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001281 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001282 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1283 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001284
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001285- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1286 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1287 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1288 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1289
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001290- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1291 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1292 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1293 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1294 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1295 #897625.
1296
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001297- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1298 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1299
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001300- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1301 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1302 and pops on either side of the deque.
1303
1304- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1305 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1306
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001307- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1308 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1309 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1310 other functions that expect a function argument.
1311
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001312- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1313
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001314- os.getsid was added.
1315
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001316- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1317 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1318 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1319
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001320- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1321
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001322- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1323
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001324- readline.clear_history was added.
1325
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001326- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1327
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001328- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1329
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001330- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1331
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001332- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1333
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001334- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1335
1336- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1337
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001338- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1339
1340- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1341
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001342- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1343 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1344 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1345
1346- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1347 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1348 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1349 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1350 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1351 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1352 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1353
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001354- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1355 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1356 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1357 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001358
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001359- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001360 iterators from a single iterable.
1361
1362- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1363 of raising a TypeError exception.
1364
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001365- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1366 as parameter.
1367
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001368Library
1369-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001370
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001371- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1372 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1373 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001374
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001375- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1376 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1377 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001378
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001379- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001380
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001381- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1382 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001383
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001384- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1385 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1386
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001387- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1388
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001389- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001390 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001391
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001392- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001393 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001394
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001395- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1396
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001397- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1398 on cygwin and mingw32.
1399
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001400- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1401
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001402- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1403 module.
1404
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001405- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1406 installation scheme for all platforms.
1407
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001408- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001409 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001410
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001411- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1412 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1413 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1414
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001415- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1416 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1417 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1418
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001419- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1420
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001421- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1422
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001423- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1424 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1425
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001426- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1427 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1428 type pattern with the same value exists.
1429
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001430- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1431 when run from the command prompt).
1432
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001433- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1434 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1435
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001436- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1437 default sort).
1438
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001439- Added global runctx function to profile module
1440
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001441- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1442
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001443- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1444
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001445- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1446
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001447- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001448 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1449 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1450 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1451 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1452 accordingly.
1453
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001454- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1455 decoding standards.
1456
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001457- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1458 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1459 called for all requests.
1460
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001461- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1462 they are passed to the compiler.
1463
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001464- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1465 indent, width and depth.
1466
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001467- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1468 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1469
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001470- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1471 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1472
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001473- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1474
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001475- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1476
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001477- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1478
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001479- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1480 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1481
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001482- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001483 for better performance.
1484
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001485- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001486
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001487- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1488 a string).
1489
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001490- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1491
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001492- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1493
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001494- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1495
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001496- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1497
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001498- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1499 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1500 list of fieldnames.
1501
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001502- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1503 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1504
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001505- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1506
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001507- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1508 empty lists.
1509
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001510- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1511 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1512 and shelves.
1513
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001514- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1515 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1516
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001517- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001518 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1519 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001520
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001521- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1522 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001523 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001524
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001525- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001526 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1527 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1528
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001529- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1530 and removed in Py2.4.
1531
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001532- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1533
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001534- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1535
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001536Tools/Demos
1537-----------
1538
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001539- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1540 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1541
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001542- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1543
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001544- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1545 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1546 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1547 destination in situations where both files are given.
1548
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001549- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1550 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1551 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1552 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1553
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001554- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1555
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001556- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1557 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1558 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1559 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1560 now.
1561
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001562- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1563 in effect
1564
1565- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1566 C-c C-h
1567
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001568- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1569 -d option was given.
1570
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001571Build
1572-----
1573
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001574- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1575 build under OS X.
1576
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001577- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1578 --enable-profiling.
1579
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001580- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1581 is configured --with-tsc.
1582
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001583- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1584 on AMD64.
1585
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001586- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1587 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1588
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001589- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1590 removed.
1591
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001592- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1593 supported (see PEP 11).
1594
1595- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1596
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001597- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1598
1599- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1600 (see PEP 11).
1601
1602- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1603 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1604
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001605C API
1606-----
1607
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001608- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1609 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1610 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1611
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001612- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1613 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1614 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1615 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1616
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001617- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1618 generator objects.
1619
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001620- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1621 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001622 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1623 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001624
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001625- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1626 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1627
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001628- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1629 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1630 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1631 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1632 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1633
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001634- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1635 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1636 about 10% faster.
1637
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001638- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1639 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1640
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001641- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1642 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1643 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1644 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1645
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001646Windows
1647-------
1648
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001649- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1650 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1651 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1652 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1653
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001654- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1655 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1656 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1657
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001658
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001659What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1660===============================
1661
1662*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1663
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001664IDLE
1665----
1666
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001667- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1668 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1669 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1670 context-menu actions.
1671
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001672- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1673 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1674 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1675 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1676 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1677 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1678 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1679 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1680 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1681
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001682
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001683What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1684=============================================
1685
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001686*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001687
1688Core and builtins
1689-----------------
1690
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001691- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001692 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001693 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1694
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001695Extension modules
1696-----------------
1697
1698- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1699 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1700 than once. This has been fixed.
1701
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001702- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1703 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1704 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1705 call.
1706
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001707- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1708
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001709Library
1710-------
1711
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001712- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1713 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1714
1715- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1716 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1717 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1718 restored.
1719
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001720IDLE
1721----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001722
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001723- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001724
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001725Build
1726-----
1727
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001728- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1729 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1730
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001731C API
1732-----
1733
1734Windows
1735-------
1736
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001737- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1738 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1739
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001740- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1741
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001742Mac
1743---
1744
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001745- Various fixes to pimp.
1746
1747- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1748
1749- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1750 more problems than it solves.
1751
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001752
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001753What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1754=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001755
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001756*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1757
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001758Core and builtins
1759-----------------
1760
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001761- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1762 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1763
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001764- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1765 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001766 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001767
1768- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1769 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1770 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001771 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001772
1773- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1774 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001775
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001776- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1777 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1778 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1779
1780- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001781 770247.
1782
1783- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001784
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001785Extension modules
1786-----------------
1787
1788- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1789 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1790
1791- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1792
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001793- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1794
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001795- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1796 contained within the _strptime module.
1797
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001798- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1799 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1800
1801- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001802 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1803
1804- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1805 the find_class attribute, if present.
1806
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001807- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001808
1809 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1810 (SF bug 763298).
1811
1812 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001813 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1814 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1815 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001816
1817 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1818
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001819Library
1820-------
1821
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001822- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1823
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001824- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1825 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1826 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1827 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1828 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1829 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1830 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1831 or Tester().
1832
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001833- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1834 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1835 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1836 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1837 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1838 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1839 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1840 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1841 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001842
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001843 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001844
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001845- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1846 weren't before was an oversight.
1847
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001848- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1849 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1850
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001851- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1852 when there are no lines.
1853
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001854- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1855 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1856
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001857- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1858 to child processes.
1859
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001860- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1861
1862- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1863
1864- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1865 xmlrpclib.
1866
1867- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1868 responses.
1869
1870- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1871 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1872
1873- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1874 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1875 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1876
1877- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1878 used as patterns.
1879
1880- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1881 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1882 than Tk 8.3.
1883
1884- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1885
1886- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001887
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001888Tools/Demos
1889-----------
1890
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001891- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1892
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001893- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1894
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001895- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001896
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001897Build
1898-----
1899
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001900- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1901
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001902- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1903
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001904- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1905 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001906
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001907- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1908 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1909 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001910
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001911C API
1912-----
1913
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001914- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1915 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1916
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001917Windows
1918-------
1919
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001920- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1921 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1922 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1923 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1924 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1925 Python exception ::
1926
1927 thread.error: can't start new thread
1928
1929 is raised now.
1930
1931- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1932 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1933 instead of from DLL teardown.
1934
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001935Mac
1936---
1937
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001938- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001939 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001940 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1941 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1942 the executable in the bundle.
1943
1944- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001945
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001946- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1947
1948- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1949 on Panther.
1950
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001951What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1952================================
1953
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001954*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001955
1956Core and builtins
1957-----------------
1958
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001959- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1960 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1961 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1962 with the -i option.
1963
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001964- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1965 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1966
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001967- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1968 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1969
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001970- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1971 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1972 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1973 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1974 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1975 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1976 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1977 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1978 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1979 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1980 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1981 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1982 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001983
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001984- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1985 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1986 embedded in a lambda expression.
1987
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001988- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1989 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1990 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1991 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1992 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1993
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001994- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1995 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1996 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1997
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001998- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1999 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2000
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002001- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2002 It's writable again.
2003
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002004- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2005 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2006 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002007 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002008
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002009- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2010 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2011 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2012
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002013Extension modules
2014-----------------
2015
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002016- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2017 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2018
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002019- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2020 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2021 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2022 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2023
2024- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2025 collection.
2026
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002027- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2028 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2029 unique within a single program run.
2030
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002031- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2032 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2033
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002034- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2035 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2036
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002037- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2038 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002039
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002040- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2041
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002042- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2043 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2044
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002045- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2046 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2047 for many BSD-derived systems.
2048
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002049
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002050Library
2051-------
2052
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002053- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2054 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2055 primary ones:
2056
2057 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2058 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2059 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2060
2061 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2062 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2063 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2064 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2065 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2066 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2067
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002068- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2069 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2070 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2071 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2072 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2073 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2074 argument.
2075
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002076- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2077 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2078 in the archive.
2079
2080- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2081 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2082
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002083- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2084 569574).
2085
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002086- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2087 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2088 no more.
2089
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002090- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2091 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2092 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2093 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2094 code coverage.
2095
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002096- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2097 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2098 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002099 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2100 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002101
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002102- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2103 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2104 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002105 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002106
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002107- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2108
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002109- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2110 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2111 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2112 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2113
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002114- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2115 handling.
2116
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002117- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2118 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2119
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002120- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2121 in socket.py.
2122
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002123- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2124
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002125- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2126 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2127 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2128 opener with proxy support.
2129
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002130- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2131
2132- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2133
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002134Tools/Demos
2135-----------
2136
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002137- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2138
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002139- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2140
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002141- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2142 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002143
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002144- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2145 files.
2146
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002147Build
2148-----
2149
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002150- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002151 different root directory.
2152
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002153C API
2154-----
2155
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002156- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2157 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2158 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2159 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2160 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2161 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2162 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2163 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2164 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2165 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2166
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002167- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2168 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2169 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2170 from Python.
2171
2172
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002173New platforms
2174-------------
2175
2176None this time.
2177
2178Tests
2179-----
2180
2181- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2182 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2183
2184Windows
2185-------
2186
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002187- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2188
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002189- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2190 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2191 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2192 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2193 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2194 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2195 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2196 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2197 that's what it's for.
2198
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002199Mac
2200---
2201
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002202- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2203 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2204 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2205 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002206- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2207 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2208- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002209
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002210SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2211------------------------------------
2212
2213430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2214598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2215622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2216661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2217683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2218697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2219713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2220724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2221727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2222729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2223730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2224731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2225732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2226733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2227735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2228740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2229744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2230745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2231747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2232749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2233751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2234753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2235755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2236757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2237760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2238
2239
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002240What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2241================================
2242
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002243*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002244
2245Core and builtins
2246-----------------
2247
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002248- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2249 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2250
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002251- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2252 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2253 and cannot be strings).
2254
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002255- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2256 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2257 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2258 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2259
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002260- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2261 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2262 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2263 Python itself.
2264
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002265- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2266 the referenced object, if it has one.
2267
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002268- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2269 the thread started at
2270 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2271
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002272- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2273 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2274 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2275 placed on a list index.
2276
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002277- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2278 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2279 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2280 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2281
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002282- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2283 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2284 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2285 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2286 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2287 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2288 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2289
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002290- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2291 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2292 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2293 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2294 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2295
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002296- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2297 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002298
2299- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2300 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2301 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2302 #693195.)
2303
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002304- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2305 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002306
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002307- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002308 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002309 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2310 interpreter executions, would fail.
2311
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002312- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002313 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002314 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002315
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002316Extension modules
2317-----------------
2318
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002319- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2320 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2321 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2322 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2323
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002324- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2325 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2326
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002327- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2328 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2329 and Greg Chapman.)
2330
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002331- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2332 recursively.
2333
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002334- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002335 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2336 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2337 leaks.
2338
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002339- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2340
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002341- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2342 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2343 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2344 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2345 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2346 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2347 #705836.
2348
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002349- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002350 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2351
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002352- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2353 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2354 See SF bug #692416.
2355
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002356- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2357 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2358
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002359- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2360 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2361 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002362
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002363- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002364 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2365 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2366
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002367- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2368 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2369 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2370 timeouts to work properly.
2371
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002372Library
2373-------
2374
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002375- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2376 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2377 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2378 future release.
2379
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002380- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2381 for querying platform dependent features.
2382
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002383- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002384
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002385- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2386 pickle protocol versions.
2387
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002388- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2389 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2390 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2391
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002392- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2393
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002394- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2395 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2396 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2397 modules.
2398
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002399- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2400 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2401 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2402
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002403- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2404 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2405
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002406- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2407 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2408 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2409
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002410- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002411 MS Office extensions.
2412
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002413- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2414 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2415
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002416- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2417 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2418
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002419- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2420 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2421 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2422 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2423 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2424 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2425
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002426- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2427 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2428 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002429
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002430- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2431 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2432 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2433
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002434- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2435
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002436- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2437 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2438 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2439
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002440Tools/Demos
2441-----------
2442
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002443- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2444 See the module docstring for details.
2445
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002446Build
2447-----
2448
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002449- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2450 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002451
2452C API
2453-----
2454
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002455- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2456
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002457- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2458 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2459 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2460
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002461- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2462 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002463
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002464 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2465 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2466 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002467
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002468- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002469 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2470
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002471- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2472 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2473 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002474
2475New platforms
2476-------------
2477
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002478None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002479
2480Tests
2481-----
2482
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002483- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2484 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002485
2486Windows
2487-------
2488
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002489- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2490 function.
2491
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002492- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2493 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002494
2495Mac
2496---
2497
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002498- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2499 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002500
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002501- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2502 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002503
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002504- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2505 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2506 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002507
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002508- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002509 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2510 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002511
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002512- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2513 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002514
2515
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002516What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2517=================================
2518
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002519*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002520
2521Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002522-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002523
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002524- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2525 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2526 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2527
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002528- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2529 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2530 (SF patch #664376.)
2531
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002532- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2533 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2534 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2535 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2536 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2537 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002538 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002539
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002540- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2541 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2542 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2543 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002544 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002545
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002546- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2547 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2548 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2549 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2550 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2551 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2552 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2553 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2554 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2555 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2556 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2557
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002558- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2559 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2560 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2561 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2562 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2563 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2564
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002565- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2566 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2567
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002568- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2569 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2570 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2571 case.)
2572
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002573- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2574 passed as unicode strings.
2575
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002576- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2577 See SF bug #683467.
2578
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002579- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2580 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2581
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002582- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2583
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002584- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2585
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002586- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2587 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2588 arguments.
2589
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002590- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2591 See SF bug #667147.
2592
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002593- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002594 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002595 See SF bug #676155.
2596
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002597- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002598 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002599 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2600 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2601 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2602 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2603 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2604 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002605
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002606Extension modules
2607-----------------
2608
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002609- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2610 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2611 tp_as_number pointer.
2612
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002613- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2614 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2615 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2616 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2617 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2618
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002619- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2620
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002621- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2622
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002623- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002624 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002625 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2626 patch #678531.)
2627
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002628- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2629 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2630
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002631- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2632 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2633
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002634- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2635
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002636- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2637 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2638 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2639
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002640- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2641
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002642- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2643 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2644
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002645- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002646
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002647- datetime changes:
2648
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002649 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2650
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002651 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2652 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2653 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2654 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2655 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2656 now.
2657
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002658 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002659 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2660 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002661
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002662 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002663 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002664 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2665 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2666 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2667 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002668
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002669 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2670 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2671 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002672 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2673
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002674 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2675 by a later example coded by Guido.
2676
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002677 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002678 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2679 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2680 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002681 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2682 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2683
2684 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2685 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2686 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2687 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2688 tzinfo subclass instance.
2689
2690 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2691 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2692 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2693 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2694 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2695 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2696 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2697 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002698
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002699 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2700 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2701 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2702 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2703 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002704 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2705
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002706 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002707
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002708 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2709 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2710 as a naive datetime object.
2711
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002712 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2713 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2714 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2715
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002716 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2717 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2718 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2719 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2720 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2721 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2722 comparison.
2723
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002724 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2725 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2726 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2727 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002728 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002729
2730 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002731
2732 and ::
2733
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002734 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2735
2736 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2737 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2738 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2739 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2740
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002741 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2742 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2743 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2744 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2745 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2746
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002747 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2748 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002749 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2750 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002751
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002752Library
2753-------
2754
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002755- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2756 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2757
2758- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2759 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2760 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2761 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2762 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2763 See PEP 307 for details.
2764
2765- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2766 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2767
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002768- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2769 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002770 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002771 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2772 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002773 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002774
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002775- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2776 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2777
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002778- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2779 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2780 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2781
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002782- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2783
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002784- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2785 exception.
2786
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002787- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2788 class.
2789
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002790- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2791 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2792 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2793
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002794- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2795 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2796
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002797- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002798 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2799 See SF bug #659228.
2800
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002801- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2802 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2803 See SF patch #651082.
2804
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002805- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002806
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002807- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2808 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2809
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002810- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002811 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002812
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002813- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2814 DOS paths from other platforms.
2815
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002816Tools/Demos
2817-----------
2818
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002819- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2820 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2821 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2822 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2823 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2824 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2825 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2826 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2827 example:
2828
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002829 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2830 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002831
2832 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2833
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002834
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002835Build
2836-----
2837
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002838- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2839 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2840 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002841 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2842
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002843 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2844
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002845- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2846 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2847 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2848 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2849 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2850 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2851 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2852 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2853 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2854
2855- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2856 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2857 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2858 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2859
2860- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2861 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2862
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002863C API
2864-----
2865
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002866- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2867 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002868
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002869- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2870 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2871 tp_as_number pointer.
2872
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002873- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2874 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2875 (SF #681367)
2876
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002877- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2878 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2879 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2880 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002881
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002882Tests
2883-----
2884
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002885- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002886 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2887 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2888 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2889 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2890 pydoc.)
2891
2892- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2893
2894- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002895
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002896Windows
2897-------
2898
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002899- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2900 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2901 time).
2902
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002903- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2904 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2905
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002906- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2907 release without strong cryptography.
2908
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002909- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002910 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002911
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002912- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2913 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2914
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002915Mac
2916---
2917
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002918- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2919 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002920
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002921- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2922 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2923 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002924
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002925- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2926 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002927
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002928- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2929 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2930 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2931 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002932
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002933- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002934 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2935 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2936 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002937
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002938
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002939What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002940=================================
2941
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002942*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002943
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002944Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002945--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002946
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002947- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2948
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002949- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2950 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002951 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002952 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002953 a different meaning than before.
2954
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002955- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002956 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002957 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002958
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002959- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002960 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002961 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002962
2963- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2964 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2965 and deallocation.
2966
2967- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2968 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2969
2970- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2971 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2972 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2973 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2974 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2975
2976- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2977 now detected by the garbage collector.
2978
2979- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2980 [SF bug 519621]
2981
2982- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2983 identifier.
2984
2985- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2986 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2987 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2988 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2989 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2990 [SF bug 563060]
2991
2992- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2993 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2994 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2995 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2996 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2997
2998- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2999 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3000 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3001
3002- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3003
3004- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3005 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3006 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3007 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3008 state of the slots would be lost.)
3009
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003010Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003011-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003012
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003013- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003014 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3015 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3016 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3017 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003018 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3019 Jython 2.1.
3020
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003021- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003022 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003023 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3024 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3025 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3026 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3027 these, see PEP 302.
3028
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003029- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3030 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3031 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3032
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003033- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3034 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3035 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3036
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003037- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3038 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3039 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3040
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003041- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3042 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3043 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3044 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3045 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3046 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3047 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3048 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3049 releases or implementations.
3050
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003051- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003052 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3053 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003054
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003055- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3056 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3057
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003058- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3059 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3060 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3061
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003062- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3063 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3064
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003065- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3066 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003067 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3068 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003069
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003070- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3071 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3072 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3073 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3074 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3075
3076 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3077 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3078 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3079 pattern.
3080
3081 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3082 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3083 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3084 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3085
3086 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3087 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3088 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3089 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3090 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3091 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3092
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003093- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3094 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3095 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3096 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3097 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3098 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3099 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3100 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003101
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003102- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3103 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3104 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3105 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3106 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003107 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3108 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3109 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3110 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3111 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3112 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3113 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003114
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003115- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3116 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3117
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003118- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3119 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3120 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3121 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3122 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3123 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3124 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3125 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3126 to Zack Weinberg!
3127
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003128- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3129 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3130 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3131 type. This has been fixed now.
3132
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003133- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3134 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3135 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3136
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003137- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3138 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3139 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3140 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3141 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3142 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3143 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3144 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003145 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003146
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003147- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3148 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3149 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003150
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003151- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3152 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3153 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3154 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3155 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3156 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3157 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3158 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003159 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003160 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3161 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3162
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003163- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3164 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3165 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3166 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3167 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3168 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3169 this.)
3170
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003171- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3172 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003173 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003174 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003175 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3176 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003177 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3178 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003179
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003180- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3181 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3182 currently running.
3183
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003184- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3185 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3186 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3187 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3188
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003189- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3190 as directory names.
3191
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003192- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3193 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3194
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003195- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3196 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3197
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003198- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003199 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3200 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003201
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003202- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3203 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3204 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3205 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3206 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3207
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003208- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3209 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3210 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3211 removed.
3212
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003213- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3214 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3215 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3216
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003217- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3218 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3219 to __debug__.
3220
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003221- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3222 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3223 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3224
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003225- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3226 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3227 deprecated now.
3228
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003229- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3230 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3231 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003232
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003233- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3234 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3235 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3236 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3237 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003238
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003239- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3240 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3241
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003242- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3243 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3244 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003245 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003246 is backward compatible.
3247
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003248- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3249 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3250 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3251 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3252 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3253
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003254- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3255 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3256 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3257 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3258 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3259 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003260
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003261- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3262 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3263
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003264- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3265 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3266
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003267- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3268 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3269 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3270 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3271 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3272
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003273- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3274 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3275 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3276
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003277- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003278 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3279
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003280- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3281 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3282 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003283
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003284- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3285 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3286
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003287- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3288 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3289 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3290
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003291- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3292
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003293Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003294-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003295
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003296- Added three operators to the operator module:
3297 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3298 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3299 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3300
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003301- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3302
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003303- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3304 archives.
3305
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003306- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3307 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3308 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3309
3310 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3311
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003312- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3313 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3314 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003315 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003316
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003317- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3318 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3319 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3320 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003321 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3322 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3323 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3324 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003325
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003326- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3327 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003328
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003329- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3330
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003331- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3332 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3333
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003334- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3335 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3336 supported.
3337
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003338- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3339
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003340- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3341 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003342
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003343- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3344 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3345
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003346- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3347
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003348- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3349 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3350
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003351- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3352 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3353 functions but callable type objects.
3354
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003355- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003356 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003357 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003358
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003359- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3360 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003361
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003362- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3363 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003364
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003365- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3366 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3367 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3368 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3369
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003370- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3371 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003372
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003373- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3374 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3375 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3376 and __imul__.
3377
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003378- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003379 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3380 is called.
3381
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003382- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3383 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3384 interpreter was compiled.
3385
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003386- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3387 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3388 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003389 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003390 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3391 1, not 2.
3392
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003393- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3394 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3395 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3396 limit.
3397
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003398- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3399 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3400 bug #623464.
3401
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003402- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3403 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3404 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3405 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3406
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003407Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003408-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003409
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003410- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3411
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003412- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3413 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3414 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3415 with Python 2.3a2.
3416
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003417- os.path exposes getctime.
3418
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003419- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003420 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003421 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003422 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003423 unit tests of floating point results.
3424
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003425- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3426 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3427 has been increased.
3428
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003429- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3430 executed.
3431
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003432- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3433 postinstallation script.
3434
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003435- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3436 test the current module.
3437
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003438- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003439 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3440 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3441 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3442 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3443
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003444- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003445 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003446 Ward's Optik package.
3447
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003448- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3449 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3450 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3451 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3452
3453- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3454 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003455 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003456
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003457- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3458 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3459 shelf are binary pickles.
3460
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003461- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3462 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3463
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003464- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3465 modules are iterators now.
3466
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003467- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3468 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3469 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3470 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3471 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3472 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003473
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003474- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3475 with their entity value.
3476
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003477- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3478
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003479- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3480 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003481
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003482- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3483 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003484 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003485
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003486- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3487 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3488 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3489 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3490 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3491 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3492 main():
3493
3494 import locale
3495 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3496
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003497- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3498 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3499
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003500- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3501 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3502 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3503 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3504 to the new standard.
3505
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003506- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3507 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3508 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3509 an extension to the database.
3510
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003511- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3512 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3513 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3514 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003515 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003516
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003517- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003518 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003519
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003520- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3521 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3522 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3523 bounded integers.
3524
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003525- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3526 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3527 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3528 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3529 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3530 in existence.
3531
3532 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3533 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3534 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3535 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3536 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3537 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3538
3539 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3540 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3541 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3542 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3543
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003544- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3545 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3546 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3547
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003548- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3549
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003550- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3551 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3552 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3553 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3554
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003555- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3556 argument.
3557
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003558- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3559 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3560 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3561 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3562 [SF patch 560794].
3563
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003564- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3565 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3566 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003567 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3568 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3569 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003570
3571- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3572 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003573
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003574- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3575 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3576 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3577 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003578
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003579- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3580 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3581 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3582 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3583 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3584
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003585- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003586
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003587- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3588
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003589- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3590 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3591 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3592 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3593 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3594 identical to None.
3595
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003596- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3597 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3598 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3599 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3600 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3601 results now.
3602
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003603- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3604 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3605
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003606- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3607 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3608 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3609 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3610 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3611 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3612 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3613 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3614
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003615- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3616
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003617- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3618 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3619
3620- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3621 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3622 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3623 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3624 and other systems.
3625
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003626- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3627 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3628 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3629 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 +00003630 work well with these.
3631
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003632- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3633
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003634- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003635 connections.
3636
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003637- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3638 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3639 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3640
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003641- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3642 sets
3643
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003644- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3645 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3646 name.
3647
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003648- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3649 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3650 passed in.
3651
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003652- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003653 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003654 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3655 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003656
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003657- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3658
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003659- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3660
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003661- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3662 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3663 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3664
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003665- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3666 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3667 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3668 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003669 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003670
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003671- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003672 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003673 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003674
3675- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3676 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3677 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3678
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003679- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003680 the value of its expression argument.
3681
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003682- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3683 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3684 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3685
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003686- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3687 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3688 skipstone browser was included.
3689
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003690- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3691 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3692
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003693Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003694-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003695
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003696- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3697 names in addition to accepting file names.
3698
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003699- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3700 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3701 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3702 still used and useful.)
3703
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003704- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3705 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3706 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3707 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003708
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003709- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3710 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3711 the generated binary.
3712
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003713Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003714-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003715
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003716- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3717
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003718- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3719 except in the hands of experts.
3720
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003721- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003722 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3723 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3724 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003725
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003726- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3727 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3728 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3729 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3730 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3731 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3732 builds.
3733
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003734- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3735 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3736 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3737 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3738 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3739 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3740 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3741 new type.
3742
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003743- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003744
3745 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3746 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3747 positive infinities.
3748
3749 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3750 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3751 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3752 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3753 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3754 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3755 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3756
3757 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3758
3759 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3760
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003761- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3762 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3763 size of the executable.
3764
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003765- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3766 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3767 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3768 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003769
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003770- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3771
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003772- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3773 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3774 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003775
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003776- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3777 well as Unix.
3778
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003779- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3780 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3781 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3782 modules in the README file for details.
3783
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003784C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003785-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003786
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003787- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3788 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003789 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003790 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003791 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003792
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003793- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3794 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3795 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3796 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3797 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3798 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003799 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003800 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3801 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3802 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3803 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3804 aligned.)
3805
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003806- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3807 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3808 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3809
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003810- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3811 level.
3812
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003813- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3814 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3815 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3816 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3817 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3818
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003819- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3820 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3821 code.
3822
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003823- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3824 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3825 adjusting for negative indices.
3826
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003827- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3828 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3829 object.
3830
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003831- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3832 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3833 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3834
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003835- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3836 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003837
3838- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3839
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003840- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3841 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3842 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3843 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3844
3845- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3846
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003847- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003848
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003849- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003850 without going through the buffer API.
3851
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003852- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003853
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003854- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3855 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3856 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3857 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3858
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003859- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3860 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3861
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003862- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003863 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3864
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003865New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003866-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003867
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003868- OpenVMS is now supported.
3869
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003870- AtheOS is now supported.
3871
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003872- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3873
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003874- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3875
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003876Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003877-----
3878
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003879- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3880 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3881 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003882
3883Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003884-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003885
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003886- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3887 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3888 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3889 bugs.
3890 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003891 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003892 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3893 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003894 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003895
3896- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003897 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003898
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003899- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3900 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3901
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003902- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3903 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003904 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003905 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3906
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003907- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3908 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3909 use files" uninstall option).
3910
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003911- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3912
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003913- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3914 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3915
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003916- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3917 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3918 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3919
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003920- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3921 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3922 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3923 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3924 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003925 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3926 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3927 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003928
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003929- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003930 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003931 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3932 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3933 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3934 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3935 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3936 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3937 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3938 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3939 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3940 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3941 work around.
3942
3943- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3944 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3945 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3946 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3947 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3948 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3949 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3950 specified with O_CREAT too).
3951
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003952Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003953----
3954
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003955- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003956
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003957- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3958 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3959 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3960
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003961- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3962 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3963 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3964
3965- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3966 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3967 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3968 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3969 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3970 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3971 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3972 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003973
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003974- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3975 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3976 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003977
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003978- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3979 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3980 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3981 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3982 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003983
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003984- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3985 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3986 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003987
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003988- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3989 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003990
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003991- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3992 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3993 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3994 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3995 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003996
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003997- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3998 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3999 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4000
4001- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4002 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4003 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004004
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004005- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4006 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4007 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4008 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004009 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004010
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004011- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4012 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004013
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004014- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4015 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004016
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004017- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004018 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004019 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4020 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004021
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004022
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004023What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004024===============================
4025
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004026*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4027
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004028Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004029--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004030
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004031- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4032 with a custom metaclass.
4033
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004034Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004035-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004036
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004037- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4038 are proxies.
4039
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004040Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004041-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004042
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004043- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4044 very short strings.
4045
4046- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4047 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4048 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4049 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4050 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4051
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004052Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004053-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004054
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004055- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4056 close or delete time).
4057
4058- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4059 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4060
4061- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4062
4063- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004064 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004065
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004066Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004067-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004068
4069Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004070-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004071
4072C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004073-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004074
4075New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004076-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004077
4078Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004079-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004080
4081Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004082-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004083
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004084- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4085
4086- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4087 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4088
4089- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4090 deleted at process exit time.
4091
4092- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4093 in backslash.
4094
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004095Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004096----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004097
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004098- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4099 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4100 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4101
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004102
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004103What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004104===========================
4105
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004106*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4107
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004108Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004109--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004110
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004111- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4112 been extensively updated. See
4113
4114 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4115
4116 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4117
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004118- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4119 deleted!
4120
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004121- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4122 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4123 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4124 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4125 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4126
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004127- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4128
4129 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4130 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4131
4132 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4133 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4134 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4135 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4136 supported anyway.
4137
4138 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4139 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4140
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004141- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4142 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4143 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4144 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4145 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004146
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004147- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4148 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4149 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4150
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004151Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004152-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004153
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004154- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4155 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4156 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4157 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4158 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4159 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004160 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4161 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4162 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4163 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004164
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004165- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4166 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4167 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4168
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004169Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004170-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004171
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004172- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4173
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004174Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004175-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004176
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004177- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4178 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4179 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4180 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4181 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4182 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4183
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004184- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4185
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004186- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4187
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004188- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4189
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004190- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4191 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4192 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4193
4194- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4195
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004196Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004197-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004198
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004199- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4200 off a search on Google.
4201
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004202Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004203-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004204
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004205- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4206 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4207 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4208 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4209 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4210 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4211 other platforms should do likewise.
4212
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004213- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4214 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4215 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4216
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004217C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004218-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004219
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004220- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4221 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4222 producing key-value pairs.
4223
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004224- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004225 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004226 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4227 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4228 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4229 previously went unchallenged.
4230
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004231New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004232-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004233
4234Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004235-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004236
4237Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004238-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004239
4240Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004241----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004242
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004243- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4244 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004245
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004246- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4247 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4248 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4249 home.
4250
4251
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004252What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004253===========================
4254
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004255*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4256
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004257Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004258--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004259
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004260- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4261 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004262
4263 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004264 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004265
4266 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4267 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004268 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004269 This needs to be documented.
4270
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004271- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4272 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4273
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004274- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4275 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4276 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4277
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004278- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4279 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4280
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004281- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4282 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4283 class forbids it).
4284
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004285- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4286 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4287 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4288
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004289- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4290
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004291Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004292-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004293
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004294- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4295 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004296 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004297
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004298- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4299 (like 1 + '').
4300
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004301Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004302-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004303
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004304- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4305 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4306 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4307 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004308 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004309 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4310
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004311- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4312 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4313 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4314 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4315
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004316- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4317 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004318 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4319 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4320 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004321
4322- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4323 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004324
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004325- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4326 bytes on its input.
4327
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004328Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004329-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004330
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004331- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004332 convenience function.
4333
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004334- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4335 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4336 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004337 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4338 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4339 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4340 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4341 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4342 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004343
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004344- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4345 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4346 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4347 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4348
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004349- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4350 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4351 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4352
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004353- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4354 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4355 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4356 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4357
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004358- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4359 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004360 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004361 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4362 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4363 new -l and -e options.
4364
4365- statcache is now deprecated.
4366
4367- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4368 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004369 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004370 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4371 time properly taken into account.
4372
4373- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4374 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4375 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4376 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4377
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004378Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004379-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004380
4381Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004382-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004383
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004384- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4385 is built with libdb3 if available.
4386
4387- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4388
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004389C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004390-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004391
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004392- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4393 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4394 PySequence_Size().
4395
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004396- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4397
4398- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4399 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4400 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4401
4402- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4403 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4404
4405- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4406 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4407
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004408New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004409-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004410
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004411- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4412 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4413
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004414- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4415 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4416
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004417- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4418
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004419Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004420-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004421
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004422- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4423 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4424
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004425Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004426-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004427
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004428Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004429----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004430
4431- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4432 removed completely in the next release.
4433
4434- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4435 OSX.
4436
4437- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4438 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4439
4440- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4441
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004442
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004443What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004444===========================
4445
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004446*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4447
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004448Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004449--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004450
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004451- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004452 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004453 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004454 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4455 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004456 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4457 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004458 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4459 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004460
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004461- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4462 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4463
4464- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4465 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4466
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004467Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004468-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004469
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004470- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4471 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4472 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4473 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4474 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4475 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4476 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4477 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4478
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004479- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4480 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4481 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4482 example).
4483
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004484- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004485 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004486 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004487 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004488
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004489- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4490 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4491 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004492 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004493
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004494- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4495 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4496 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4497 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4498 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4499 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4500
4501 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4502
4503 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4504
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004505Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004506-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004507
4508- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4509
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004510- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4511
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004512- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4513 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004514
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004515- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4516 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4517 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4518 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4519 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4520 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004521 attributes.
4522
4523- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4524 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4525 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004526
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004527- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4528 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4529 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004530
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004531- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4532 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4533 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004534 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4535 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4536
4537- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4538 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004539
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004540Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004541-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004542
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004543- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4544 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4545
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004546- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4547 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4548 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4549 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4550
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004551- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4552 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4553 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4554 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4555
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004556 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4557 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4558 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4559 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4560 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4561 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4562 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4563 without losing information).
4564
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004565- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004566 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4567 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4568 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4569 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4570 module).
4571
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004572 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004573 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4574 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4575 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4576 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004577
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004578- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004579 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4580 encoding.
4581
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004582- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4583 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4584
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004585- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004586 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4587
4588- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4589 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4590 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4591 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4592
4593- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4594
4595- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4596 ON, and OFF.
4597
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004598- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4599 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4600
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004601Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004602-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004603
4604- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4605 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4606 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004607
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004608- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4609 been added: -X and -E.
4610
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004611Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004612-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004613
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004614- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4615 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4616
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004617C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004618-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004619
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004620- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4621 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4622 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4623 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4624 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4625
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004626- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4627 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4628 as long) arguments.
4629
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004630- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4631 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4632 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4633 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4634 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4635 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4636
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004637- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4638 input.
4639
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004640New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004641-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004642
4643Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004644-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004645
4646Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004647-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004648
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004649- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4650 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4651 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4652
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004653- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4654 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4655 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004656 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004657
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004658 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4659 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4660 import signal
4661 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004662
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004663 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004664 while 1:
4665 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004666 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004667 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4668 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4669 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4670 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004671
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004672
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004673What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4674===========================
4675
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004676*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4677
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004678Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004679--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004680
4681- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4682 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4683 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4684
4685- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4686 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4687 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4688 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4689 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4690 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4691 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004692
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004693- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004694 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004695 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4696 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4697 associate a docstring with a property.
4698
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004699- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4700 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4701 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4702 other built-in object types.
4703
4704- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4705 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4706 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4707 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4708 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4709
4710- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4711 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4712
4713- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4714 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004715 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004716 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4717 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4718 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4719 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4720 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4721
4722- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4723 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4724 class.
4725
4726- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4727 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4728 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4729 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4730
4731- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4732 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4733 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4734 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4735
4736- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4737 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4738
4739- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4740 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4741 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4742 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4743 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004744 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004745 with the same value as s.
4746
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004747- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4748
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004749Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004750----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004751
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004752- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4753
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004754- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4755 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4756 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4757 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4758 objects.
4759
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004760- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4761 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004762 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4763 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4764
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004765- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4766 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4767 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4768
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004769Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004770-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004771
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004772- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4773 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4774 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4775 by the instances.
4776
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004777- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4778 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4779 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4780
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004781- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4782 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4783 before the entire comparison is complete.
4784
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004785- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4786 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4787 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4788
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004789- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4790 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4791 getwriter().
4792
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004793- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4794 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4795
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004796- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004797 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4798 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4799
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004800- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4801 iterable object.
4802
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004803- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4804 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004805
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004806- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4807 authentication.
4808
4809- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4810 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004811
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004812- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004813 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4814 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4815 a sample driver.)
4816
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004817Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004818-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004819
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004820- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4821 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4822 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4823 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4824 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4825 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4826 kernel has large file support.
4827
4828- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4829 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4830 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4831 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4832 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4833
4834- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4835 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4836 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4837
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004838C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004839-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004840
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004841- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4842 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4843
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004844New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004845-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004846
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004847- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4848 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4849
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004850Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004851-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004852
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004853- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4854 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4855 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4856 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4857 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4858
4859- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4860 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4861 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4862 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4863
4864- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4865 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4866
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004867Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004868-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004869
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004870- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004871 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4872 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004873
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004874
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004875What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4876===========================
4877
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004878*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4879
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004880Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004881----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004882
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004883- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4884 big to represent as a C double.
4885
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004886- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4887 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4888 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4889 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4890 restriction).
4891
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004892- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4893 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4894 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4895 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4896 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4897
4898 >>> dir([])
4899 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4900 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4901 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4902 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4903 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4904 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4905 'reverse', 'sort']
4906
4907 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4908
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004909- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004910 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4911 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4912 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4913 OverflowError exception.
4914
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004915- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004916 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004917 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4918 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4919 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4920 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4921 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004922 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004923 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4924 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4925
4926 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4927 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4928 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4929 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004930
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004931- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004932 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4933 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4934 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4935 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4936 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4937 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4938 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4939 once it is created.
4940
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004941- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4942 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4943 (key, value) pairs.
4944
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004945- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004946 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4947 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4948
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004949- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4950 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4951 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4952 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4953 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004954
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004955- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004956 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4957 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4958
4959 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4960
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004961- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004962 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4963
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004964Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004965-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004966
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004967- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004968 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4969 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004970
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004971- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4972 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4973 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4974 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4975 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4976 in this area anymore).
4977
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004978- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4979 threading.Timer.
4980
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004981- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4982 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4983
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004984- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004985 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4986
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004987- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004988 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4989 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4990 converted to Python longs.
4991
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004992- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004993 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4994
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004995- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4996 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4997 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4998
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004999Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005000-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005001
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005002- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5003 division operators as per PEP 238.
5004
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005005Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005006-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005007
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005008- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5009 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5010 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5011 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5012
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005013C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005014-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005015
5016- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005017
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005018- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5019 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005020 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005021
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005022 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5023 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005024 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005025 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005026
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005027- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005028 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5029 module:
5030
5031 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005032
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005033 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5034 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005035
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005036 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5037 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005038
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005039 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5040
5041 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5042
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005043- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005044 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5045 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5046 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005047
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005048New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005049-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005050
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005051- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5052 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5053 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5054 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5055 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005056
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005057Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005058-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005059
5060Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005061-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005062
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005063- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5064 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5065 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5066 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005067 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5068 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5069 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5070 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5071 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005072
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005073- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005074 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5075
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005076
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005077What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5078===========================
5079
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005080*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5081
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005082Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005083-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005084
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005085- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5086 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5087
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005088- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5089 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5090 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005091
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005092- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5093 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5094 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5095 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005096
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005097- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5098
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005099- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005100
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005101Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005102-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005103
5104- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005105 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005106 the module docstring for details.
5107
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005108Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005109-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005110
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005111- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005112 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5113 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5114 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005115
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005116- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5117 Nick Mathewson.
5118
5119Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005120----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005121
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005122- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5123 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5124 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5125 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5126 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5127 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5128 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5129 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5130
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005131- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5132 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5133 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5134 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5135
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005136- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5137 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5138 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5139 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5140 come a long way).
5141
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005142- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5143 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5144 write filters for these warnings).
5145
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005146- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5147 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5148 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5149 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5150 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5151
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005152- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5153 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5154 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5155 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5156 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5157 older distribution.
5158
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005159Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005160-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005161
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005162- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5163 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005164 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005165
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005166- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5167 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5168 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5169
5170- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5171
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005172- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5173
5174- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5175
5176- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5177
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005178- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005179
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005180- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5181
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005182New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005183-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005184
5185C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005186-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005187
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005188- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5189 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5190 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5191 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5192 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5193 against buffer overruns.
5194
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005195- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005196 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5197 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005198 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5199 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5200 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5201
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005202- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5203 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5204 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5205 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5206 deprecated.
5207
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005208Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005209-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005210
5211- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5212 relevant is found.
5213
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005214
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005215What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005216===========================
5217
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005218*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5219
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005220Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005221----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005222
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005223- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5224 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5225 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5226 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5227 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5228 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5229 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5230 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005231 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005232 repaired.
5233
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005234- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005235 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005236 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5237 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5238 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5239 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5240 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5241 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5242 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5243 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5244
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005245- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5246 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5247 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5248 leading BMO character).
5249
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005250- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5251 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5252 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5253
5254 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5255 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5256 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005257
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005258 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5259 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5260 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5261 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5262 for various simple to use conversions.
5263
5264 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5265 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5266
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005267 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5268 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5269 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5270 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5271 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5272 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5273 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5274 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5275 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5276 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5277 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5278 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5279 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5280 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5281 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005282
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005283- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5284 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5285 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005286 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005287 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005288
5289 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005290 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5291 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5292 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5293 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5294 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005295 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5296 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005297
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005298 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5299 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5300 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005301 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005302
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005303- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5304 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5305 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5306 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5307 floating arithmetic,
5308
5309 x = 9007199254740992.0
5310 print long(x)
5311
5312 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5313 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5314 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5315 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5316 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5317 functions are of good quality).
5318
5319 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5320 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5321 algorithms to break.
5322
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005323- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5324 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5325 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5326 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5327 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5328 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5329 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5330 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5331 order.
5332
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005333- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5334 operation along the most common code paths.
5335
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005336- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5337 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5338
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005339- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5340 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5341 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5342 {}.update(UserDict())
5343
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005344- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5345 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5346 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5347 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5348 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5349 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5350 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5351 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5352
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005353- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005354 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005355
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005356 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005357 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5358 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005359 join() method of strings
5360 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005361 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5362 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005363 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005364 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005365
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005366- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5367 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5368
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005369- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5370 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5371
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005372- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5373 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5374 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5375 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5376
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005377- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5378 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005379 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005380 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5381 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005382
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005383- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5384
5385
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005386Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005387-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005388
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005389- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005390 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005391 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5392 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5393
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005394- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5395 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5396
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005397- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5398 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5399 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5400 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5401
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005402- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5403 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5404 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5405
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005406- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5407
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005408- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5409
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005410- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5411 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5412 that are still imported into string.py).
5413
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005414- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5415
5416- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5417 Now it does.
5418
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005419- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5420
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005421- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5422 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5423 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5424 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5425 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005426 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5427 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005428
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005429- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5430 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5431 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5432 'help(object)'.
5433
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005434Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005435-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005436
5437- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005438 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005439 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5440 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5441
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005442- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005443 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5444 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005445
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005446C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005447-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005448
5449- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5450 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005451
5452----
5453
5454**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**