blob: 073ef6ce8c01ccbc4f7ff43021a6d068e0254477 [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2006*
11
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000012Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Martin v. Löwis18e16552006-02-15 17:27:45 +000015- PEP 353: Using ssize_t as the index type.
16
Neal Norwitzfc76d632006-01-10 06:03:13 +000017- Patch #1400181, fix unicode string formatting to not use the locale.
18 This is how string objects work. u'%f' could use , instead of .
19 for the decimal point. Now both strings and unicode always use periods.
20
Neal Norwitz671b9e32006-01-09 07:07:12 +000021- Bug #1244610, #1392915, fix build problem on OpenBSD 3.7 and 3.8.
22 configure would break checking curses.h.
23
Georg Brandlcd4d1e82005-12-27 17:37:07 +000024- Bug #959576: The pwd module is now builtin. This allows Python to be
25 built on UNIX platforms without $HOME set.
26
Neal Norwitzc10978f2005-12-19 06:07:16 +000027- Bug #1072182, fix some potential problems if characters are signed.
28
Neal Norwitz5d0ad502005-12-19 04:27:42 +000029- Bug #889500, fix line number on SyntaxWarning for global declarations.
30
Neal Norwitzdb83eb32005-12-18 05:29:30 +000031- Bug #1378022, UTF-8 files with a leading BOM crashed the interpreter.
32
Neal Norwitze7214a12005-12-18 05:03:17 +000033- Support for converting hex strings to floats no longer works.
34 This was not portable. float('0x3') now raises a ValueError.
35
Barry Warsaw2a38a862005-12-18 01:27:35 +000036- Patch #1382163: Expose Subversion revision number to Python. New C API
37 function Py_GetBuildNumber(). New attribute sys.build_number. Build number
38 is now displayed in interactive prompt banner.
39
Georg Brandlfa166682005-12-17 21:45:17 +000040- Implementation of PEP 341 - Unification of try/except and try/finally.
41 "except" clauses can now be written together with a "finally" clause in
Neal Norwitz11ca77e2005-12-17 22:24:12 +000042 one try statement instead of two nested ones. Patch #1355913.
Georg Brandlfa166682005-12-17 21:45:17 +000043
Hye-Shik Chang835b2432005-12-17 04:38:31 +000044- Bug #1379994: Builtin unicode_escape and raw_unicode_escape codec
45 now encodes backslash correctly.
46
Martin v. Löwisb45b3152005-11-28 17:34:23 +000047- Patch #1350409: Work around signal handling bug in Visual Studio 2005.
48
Georg Brandlf06e30a2005-11-24 15:37:42 +000049- Bug #1281408: Py_BuildValue now works correct even with unsigned longs
50 and long longs.
51
Neal Norwitz67715f02005-11-09 06:59:35 +000052- SF Bug #1350188, "setdlopenflags" leads to crash upon "import"
53 It was possible dlerror() returns a NULL pointer, use a default error
54 message in this case.
55
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +000056- Replaced most Unicode charmap codecs with new ones using the
57 new Unicode translate string feature in the builtin charmap
58 codec; the codecs were created from the mapping tables available
59 at ftp.unicode.org and contain a few updates (e.g. the Mac OS
60 encodings now include a mapping for the Apple logo)
61
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +000062- Added a few more codecs for Mac OS encodings
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +000063
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +000064- Speed up some Unicode operations.
65
66- A new AST parser implementation was completed.
67
Neal Norwitzb6570f52005-10-21 06:26:10 +000068- SF bug #1167751: fix incorrect code being for generator expressions.
Neal Norwitz16af7342005-10-21 06:25:33 +000069 The following code now raises a SyntaxError: foo(a = i for i in range(10))
70
Neal Norwitz708e51a2005-10-03 04:48:15 +000071- SF Bug #976608: fix SystemError when mtime of an imported file is -1.
72
Neal Norwitz11bd1192005-10-03 00:54:56 +000073- SF Bug #887946: fix segfault when redirecting stdin from a directory.
74 Provide a warning when a directory is passed on the command line.
75
Neal Norwitz40d37812005-10-02 01:48:49 +000076- Fix segfault with invalid coding.
77
78- SF bug #772896: unknown encoding results in MemoryError.
79
Raymond Hettinger6b27cda2005-09-24 21:23:05 +000080- All iterators now have a Boolean value of true. Formerly, some iterators
81 supported a __len__() method which evaluated to False when the iterator
82 was empty.
83
Guido van Rossum630db602005-09-20 18:49:54 +000084- On 64-bit platforms, when __len__() returns a value that cannot be
85 represented as a C int, raise OverflowError.
86
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000087- test__locale is skipped on OS X < 10.4 (only partial locale support is
Walter Dörwald6611a8b2005-10-09 19:28:35 +000088 present).
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000089
Georg Brandl80bbf3f2005-09-14 19:38:29 +000090- SF bug #893549: parsing keyword arguments was broken with a few format
91 codes.
92
Guido van Rossum8ee3e5a2005-09-14 18:09:42 +000093- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on AIX 5.3
94 with IBM's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1284289). This also closes SF
95 bug #105470: test_pwd fails on 64bit system (Opteron).
96
Guido van Rossum539c6622005-09-14 17:49:54 +000097- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on HP-UX 11 on
98 Itanium2 with HP's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1225212).
99
Georg Brandl4550b8d2005-08-26 06:43:52 +0000100- Disallow keyword arguments for type constructors that don't use them
Georg Brandl02c42872005-08-26 06:42:30 +0000101 (fixes bug #1119418).
102
Martin v. Löwisd35edda2005-08-24 08:39:24 +0000103- Forward UnicodeDecodeError into SyntaxError for source encoding errors.
104
Barry Warsawe2eca0b2005-08-15 18:14:19 +0000105- SF bug #900092: When tracing (e.g. for hotshot), restore 'return' events for
106 exceptions that cause a function to exit.
107
Raymond Hettinger9f1a6792005-07-31 01:16:36 +0000108- The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
109 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
110 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
111
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +0000112- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
113
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +0000114- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
115 reference counts in some error exit cases.
116
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000117- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
118 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
119 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
120 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
121 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
122 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
123 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
124 realloc.
125
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +0000126- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
127 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
128
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +0000129- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
130 like their int counterparts.
131
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +0000132- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
133 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
134 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
135 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
136 for a longer write-up of the problem).
137
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +0000138- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
139 serializing floats.
140
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +0000141- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
142 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
143 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
144
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +0000145- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
146 278.
147
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000148- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
149 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
150 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
151 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000152 to the base class has been moved to the proper nb_* magic slot and out of
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000153 PyNumber_*().
154 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
155
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +0000156- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
157 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
158 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
159 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
160
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +0000161- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
162 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
163 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
164 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
165 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
166
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +0000167- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
168 disabled caused a crash.
169
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000170- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
171 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
172
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000173- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +0000174 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
175
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +0000176- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
177
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000178- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +0000179 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
180 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
181 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000182
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +0000183- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
184
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +0000185- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
186 returning None.
187
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000188- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +0000189 ('\') with a specific error message.
190
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +0000191- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
192
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +0000193- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
194 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
195
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000196- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000197 an ferror() call.
198
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000199- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
200 list.sort().
201
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000202- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
203 (2+3) --> (5).
204
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000205- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
206
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000207- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
208 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000209
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000210- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
211 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
212 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
213
Neil Schemenauercf52c072005-08-12 17:34:58 +0000214- Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a
215 unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and
216 calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance.
217
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000218Extension Modules
219-----------------
220
Neal Norwitz082b2df2006-02-07 07:04:46 +0000221- Bug #876637, prevent stack corruption when socket descriptor
222 is larger than FD_SETSIZE.
223
Neal Norwitz0e6bc8c2006-02-05 05:45:43 +0000224- Patch #1407135, bug #1424041: harmonize mmap behavior of anonymous memory.
225 mmap.mmap(-1, size) now returns anonymous memory in both Unix and Windows.
226 mmap.mmap(0, size) should not be used on Windows for anonymous memory.
227
Martin v. Löwis57a34e82006-02-04 19:12:37 +0000228- Patch #1422385: The nis module now supports access to domains other
229 than the system default domain.
230
Martin v. Löwis14694662006-02-03 12:54:16 +0000231- Use Win32 API to implement os.stat/fstat. As a result, subsecond timestamps
232 are reported, the limit on path name lengths is removed, and stat reports
233 WindowsError now (instead of OSError).
234
Gregory P. Smithcfc4a8d2006-01-29 19:46:23 +0000235- Add bsddb.db.DBEnv.set_tx_timestamp allowing time based database recovery.
236
Neal Norwitz62a21122006-01-25 05:21:55 +0000237- Bug #1413192, fix seg fault in bsddb if a transaction was deleted
238 before the env.
239
Martin v. Löwis11017b12006-01-14 18:12:57 +0000240- Patch #1103116: Basic AF_NETLINK support.
241
Neal Norwitz3b4fff82006-01-11 08:54:45 +0000242- Bug #1402308, (possible) segfault when using mmap.mmap(-1, ...)
243
Neal Norwitz88bbd732006-01-10 07:05:44 +0000244- Bug #1400822, _curses over{lay,write} doesn't work when passing 6 ints.
245 Also fix ungetmouse() which did not accept arguments properly.
246 The code now conforms to the documented signature.
247
Neal Norwitz5e3d8622006-01-09 06:24:35 +0000248- Bug #1400115, Fix segfault when calling curses.panel.userptr()
249 without prior setting of the userptr.
250
Neal Norwitz40c6b472006-01-05 05:43:35 +0000251- Fix 64-bit problems in bsddb.
252
Neal Norwitz8856fb72005-12-18 03:34:22 +0000253- Patch #1365916: fix some unsafe 64-bit mmap methods.
254
Hye-Shik Changc5c57e62005-12-12 11:48:32 +0000255- Bug #1290333: Added a workaround for cjkcodecs' _codecs_cn build
256 problem on AIX.
257
Georg Brandla13c2442005-11-22 19:30:31 +0000258- Bug #869197: os.setgroups rejects long integer arguments
259
Neal Norwitz0f46bbf2005-11-03 05:00:25 +0000260- Bug #1346533, select.poll() doesn't raise an error if timeout > sys.maxint
261
Neal Norwitz7b631792005-11-02 05:26:07 +0000262- Bug #1344508, Fix UNIX mmap leaking file descriptors
263
Neal Norwitzf3396542005-10-28 05:52:22 +0000264- Patch #1338314, Bug #1336623: fix tarfile so it can extract
265 REGTYPE directories from tarfiles written by old programs.
266
Gregory P. Smithe101df92006-01-24 20:09:45 +0000267- Patch #1407992, fixes broken bsddb module db associate when using
268 BerkeleyDB 3.3, 4.0 or 4.1.
269
270- Get bsddb module to build with BerkeleyDB version 4.4
271
272- Get bsddb module to build with BerkeleyDB version 3.2
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +0000273
Neal Norwitz484d9a42005-09-30 04:46:49 +0000274- Patch #1309009, Fix segfault in pyexpat when the XML document is in latin_1,
275 but Python incorrectly assumes it is in UTF-8 format
276
Georg Brandle677adc2005-09-29 13:40:49 +0000277- Fix parse errors in the readline module when compiling without threads.
278
Hye-Shik Chang9ceebd52005-09-24 14:58:47 +0000279- Patch #1288833: Removed thread lock from socket.getaddrinfo on
280 FreeBSD 5.3 and later versions which got thread-safe getaddrinfo(3).
281
Michael W. Hudson10402a32005-09-22 09:19:01 +0000282- Patches #1298449 and #1298499: Add some missing checks for error
283 returns in cStringIO.c.
284
Neal Norwitz058bde12005-09-21 06:44:25 +0000285- Patch #1297028: fix segfault if call type on MultibyteCodec,
286 MultibyteStreamReader, or MultibyteStreamWriter
287
Neal Norwitzcfe7dd92005-09-19 06:49:27 +0000288- Fix memory leak in posix.access().
289
Martin v. Löwis8b291e22005-09-18 08:17:56 +0000290- Patch #1213831: Fix typo in unicodedata._getcode.
291
Georg Brandlfb1ef852005-09-14 20:53:32 +0000292- Bug #1007046: os.startfile() did not accept unicode strings encoded in
293 the file system encoding.
294
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000295- Patch #756021: Special-case socket.inet_aton('255.255.255.255') for
296 platforms that don't have inet_aton().
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000297
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000298- Bug #1215928: Fix bz2.BZ2File.seek() for 64-bit file offsets.
299
300- Bug #1191043: Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines for files containing one
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000301 line without newlines.
302
Georg Brandl38387b82005-08-24 07:17:40 +0000303- Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did
304 on Windows.
305
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000306- Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
Martin v. Löwisebd9d5b2005-08-09 15:00:59 +0000307 st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
308
Michael W. Hudson8137bea2005-07-27 20:24:40 +0000309- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
310 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
311 for large or negative values.
312
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000313- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000314 implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false.
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000315
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000316- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
317
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000318- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
319 if available on the platform.
320
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000321- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
322 available on the platform.
323
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000324- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
325 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
326
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000327- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
328
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000329- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
330 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
331 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
332
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000333- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
334
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000335- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
336 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
337
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000338- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000339 file size.
340
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000341- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
342
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000343- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
344 {remove_history,replace_history}
345
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000346- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
347 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000348
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000349- stat_float_times is now True.
350
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000351- array.array objects are now picklable.
352
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000353- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
354 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
355
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000356- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
357 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
358 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
359
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000360- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
361 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000362
363Library
364-------
365
Georg Brandl21dd1af2006-02-17 13:35:13 +0000366- Patch #1417555: SimpleHTTPServer now returns Last-Modified headers.
367
Georg Brandlbd3bc4d2006-02-17 09:52:53 +0000368- Bug #1430298: It is now possible to send a mail with an empty
369 return address using smtplib.
370
Georg Brandl0e1abe22006-02-17 09:48:14 +0000371- Bug #1432260: The names of lambda functions are now properly displayed
372 in pydoc.
Georg Brandl501dd0d2006-02-17 09:45:40 +0000373
Martin v. Löwis00756902006-02-05 17:09:41 +0000374- Patch #1412872: zipfile now sets the creator system to 3 (Unix)
375 unless the system is Win32.
376
Martin v. Löwisc81e3a62006-01-30 15:04:31 +0000377- Patch #1349118: urllib now supports user:pass@ style proxy
Martin v. Löwis3e865952006-01-24 15:51:21 +0000378 specifications, raises IOErrors when proxies for unsupported protocols
379 are defined, and uses the https proxy on https redirections.
380
Georg Brandl531ceba2006-01-21 07:20:56 +0000381- Bug #902075: urllib2 now supports 'host:port' style proxy specifications.
382
383- Bug #1407902: Add support for sftp:// URIs to urlparse.
Georg Brandl89f35ac2006-01-20 17:24:23 +0000384
Georg Brandlb709c2c2006-01-20 09:07:35 +0000385- Bug #1371247: Update Windows locale identifiers in locale.py.
386
Neal Norwitzf60cd472006-01-14 07:05:13 +0000387- Bug #1394565: SimpleHTTPServer now doesn't choke on query parameters
Georg Brandl45ab2332006-01-13 17:05:56 +0000388 any more.
Georg Brandlb709c2c2006-01-20 09:07:35 +0000389
Georg Brandl4edd9892006-01-13 16:59:46 +0000390- Bug #1403410: The warnings module now doesn't get confused
391 when it can't find out the module name it generates a warning for.
Georg Brandlb709c2c2006-01-20 09:07:35 +0000392
Martin v. Löwis412ed3b2006-01-08 10:45:39 +0000393- Patch #1177307: Added a new codec utf_8_sig for UTF-8 with a BOM signature.
394
Neal Norwitzab86f8e2005-12-23 21:44:36 +0000395- Patch #1157027: cookielib mishandles RFC 2109 cookies in Netscape mode
396
Neal Norwitz338e7862005-12-23 21:27:46 +0000397- Patch #1117398: cookielib.LWPCookieJar and .MozillaCookieJar now raise
398 LoadError as documented, instead of IOError. For compatibility,
399 LoadError subclasses IOError.
400
Brett Cannon3cbd0382005-12-16 22:49:23 +0000401- Added the hashlib module. It provides secure hash functions for MD5 and
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000402 SHA1, 224, 256, 384, and 512. Note that recent developments make the
403 historic MD5 and SHA1 unsuitable for cryptographic-strength applications.
404 In <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-December/058850.html>
405 Ronald L. Rivest offered this advice for Python:
406
407 "The consensus of researchers in this area (at least as
408 expressed at the NIST Hash Function Workshop 10/31/05),
409 is that SHA-256 is a good choice for the time being, but
410 that research should continue, and other alternatives may
411 arise from this research. The larger SHA's also seem OK."
Brett Cannon3cbd0382005-12-16 22:49:23 +0000412
Fredrik Lundh7e0aef02005-12-12 18:54:55 +0000413- Added a subset of Fredrik Lundh's ElementTree package. Available
414 modules are xml.etree.ElementTree, xml.etree.ElementPath, and
415 xml.etree.ElementInclude, from ElementTree 1.2.6.
416
Martin v. Löwis307021f2005-11-27 16:59:04 +0000417- Patch #1162825: Support non-ASCII characters in IDLE window titles.
418
Georg Brandl1f663572005-11-26 16:50:44 +0000419- Bug #1365984: urllib now opens "data:" URLs again.
420
Brett Cannonad07ff22005-11-23 02:15:50 +0000421- Patch #1314396: prevent deadlock for threading.Thread.join() when an exception
422 is raised within the method itself on a previous call (e.g., passing in an
423 illegal argument)
424
Brett Cannon5d0bf942005-11-02 23:04:26 +0000425- Bug #1340337: change time.strptime() to always return ValueError when there
426 is an error in the format string.
427
Georg Brandle8f24432005-10-03 14:16:44 +0000428- Patch #754022: Greatly enhanced webbrowser.py (by Oleg Broytmann).
429
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000430- Bug #729103: pydoc.py: Fix docother() method to accept additional
Georg Brandl8b813db2005-10-01 16:32:31 +0000431 "parent" argument.
432
Georg Brandlaa935172005-09-29 20:49:16 +0000433- Patch #1300515: xdrlib.py: Fix pack_fstring() to really use null bytes
434 for padding.
435
Georg Brandl80ba8e82005-09-29 20:16:07 +0000436- Bug #1296004: httplib.py: Limit maximal amount of data read from the
437 socket to avoid a MemoryError on Windows.
438
Matthias Klosef3f231f2005-09-20 07:02:49 +0000439- Patch #1166948: locale.py: Prefer LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE and LANG over LANGUAGE
440 to get the correct encoding.
441
442- Patch #1166938: locale.py: Parse LANGUAGE as a colon separated list of
443 languages.
444
Martin v. Löwis4ed67382005-09-18 08:34:39 +0000445- Patch #1268314: Cache lines in StreamReader.readlines for performance.
446
Brett Cannona783d062005-09-15 02:34:56 +0000447- Bug #1290505: Fix clearing the regex cache for time.strptime().
448
Martin v. Löwis5dbdc592005-08-27 10:07:56 +0000449- Bug #1167128: Fix size of a symlink in a tarfile to be 0.
450
Georg Brandl5a650a22005-08-26 08:51:34 +0000451- Patch #810023: Fix off-by-one bug in urllib.urlretrieve reporthook
452 functionality.
453
Martin v. Löwis8b595142005-08-25 11:03:38 +0000454- Bug #1163178: Make IDNA return an empty string when the input is empty.
455
Georg Brandl532efab2005-08-24 22:34:21 +0000456- Patch #848017: Make Cookie more RFC-compliant. Use CRLF as default output
457 separator and do not output trailing semicola.
458
Georg Brandlb9256022005-08-24 18:46:39 +0000459- Patch #1062060: urllib.urlretrieve() now raises a new exception, named
460 ContentTooShortException, when the actually downloaded size does not
461 match the Content-Length header.
462
Martin v. Löwis0a5d4a22005-08-24 14:55:22 +0000463- Bug #1121494: distutils.dir_utils.mkpath now accepts Unicode strings.
464
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000465- Bug #1178484: Return complete lines from codec stream readers
466 even if there is an exception in later lines, resulting in
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000467 correct line numbers for decoding errors in source code.
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000468
Georg Brandl6d2b3462005-08-24 07:36:17 +0000469- Bug #1192315: Disallow negative arguments to clear() in pdb.
470
Martin v. Löwisb813c532005-08-07 20:51:04 +0000471- Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
472
Georg Brandl649f8e72005-08-03 07:30:12 +0000473- Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
474 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
475
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000476- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
477 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
478 Tkdnd.
479
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000480- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
481 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
482
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000483- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
484 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
485
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000486- textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000487 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
488
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000489- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
490 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
491
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000492- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
493 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
494
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000495- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000496 it can be missing in embedded interpreters
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000497
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000498- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
499
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000500- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
501 error messages.
502
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000503- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
504
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000505- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
506 Bug #1224621.
507
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000508- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
509 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
510 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
511 terminates by raising StopIteration.
512
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000513- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
514
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000515- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
516 component of the path.
517
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000518- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
519 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
520 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
521 class at all.
522
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000523- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
524 files to PyPI.
525
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000526- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
527 them to PyPI.
528
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000529- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
530 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
531 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
532 work as expected.
533
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000534- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
535 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
536
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000537- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000538 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
539
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000540- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
541
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000542- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
543 to build.
544
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000545- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
546 symbolic links on Windows.
547
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000548- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000549 profile.py if available.
550
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000551- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
552
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000553- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
554 in LWPCookieJar.
555
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000556- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
557
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000558- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
559
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000560- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
561
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000562- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
563
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000564- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
565
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000566- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
567
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000568- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
569
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000570- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
571
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000572- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
573 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
574 be exploited in various ways.
575
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000576- Bug #1222790: in SimpleXMLRPCServer, set the reuse-address and close-on-exec
Andrew M. Kuchling3a976052005-12-04 15:07:41 +0000577 flags on the HTTP listening socket.
578
Andrew M. Kuchlinge63fde72005-12-04 15:36:57 +0000579- Bug #792570: SimpleXMLRPCServer had problems if the request grew too large.
580 Fixed by reading the HTTP body in chunks instead of one big socket.read().
581
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000582- Patches #893642, #1039083: add allow_none, encoding arguments to constructors of
Andrew M. Kuchling10a16de2005-12-04 16:34:40 +0000583 SimpleXMLRPCServer and CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler.
584
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000585- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
586
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000587- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
588
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000589- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
590
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000591- Enhancements to the csv module:
592
593 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000594 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000595 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000596 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
597 reporting.
598 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
599 dictates.
600 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000601 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000602 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000603 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
604 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000605 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
606 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000607 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000608 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
609 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
610 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
611 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
612 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
613 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
614 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
615 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
616 without first creating a dialect class.
617 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
618 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
619 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000620 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000621 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
622 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000623 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
624 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
625 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
626 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000627 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
628 This has been fixed.
629
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000630- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
631 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
632 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
633 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
634
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000635- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
636
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000637- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
638 (Bug #951915).
639
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000640- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
641 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
642 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000643 encoding alias table.
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000644
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000645- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
646
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000647- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
648 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
649
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000650- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
651
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000652- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
653
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000654- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
655
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000656- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
657
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000658- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
659
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000660- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
661 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
662 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
663
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000664- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000665 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000666
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000667- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
668 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
669 tokenizer with very long source lines.
670
Barry Warsaw538561e2006-01-01 21:48:54 +0000671- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called
672 immediately after creating the object, without any intervening
673 ``.decompress()`` calls.
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000674
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000675- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
676 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000677
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000678- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
679 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
680
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000681- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
682 correctly.
683
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000684- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
685 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
686 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
687 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
688 between two lines.
689
Walter Dörwalda47d1c02005-08-30 10:23:14 +0000690- Bug #1251300: On UCS-4 builds the "unicode-internal" codec will now complain
691 about illegal code points. The codec now supports PEP 293 style error
692 handlers.
693
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000694- Bug #1235646: ``codecs.StreamRecoder.next()`` now reencodes the data it reads
Walter Dörwaldc5238b82005-09-01 11:56:53 +0000695 from the input stream, so that the output is a byte string in the correct
696 encoding instead of a unicode string.
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000697
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000698- Bug #1202493: Fixing SRE parser to handle '{}' as perl does, rather than
699 considering it exactly like a '*'.
700
Walter Dörwald007f8df2005-10-09 19:42:27 +0000701- Bug #1245379: Add "unicode-1-1-utf-7" as an alias for "utf-7" to
702 ``encodings.aliases``.
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000703
Walter Dörwald09f0dd52005-11-21 19:10:07 +0000704- ` uu.encode()`` and ``uu.decode()`` now support unicode filenames.
705
Gustavo Niemeyer548148812006-01-31 18:34:13 +0000706- Patch #1413711: Certain patterns of differences were making difflib
707 touch the recursion limit.
708
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000709Build
710-----
711
Martin v. Löwis86d66262006-02-17 08:40:11 +0000712- Patch #1432345: Make python compile on DragonFly.
713
Martin v. Löwis856bf9a2006-02-14 20:42:55 +0000714- Build support for Win64-AMD64 was added.
715
Martin v. Löwisa55e55e2006-02-11 15:55:14 +0000716- Patch #1428494: Prefer linking against ncursesw over ncurses library.
717
Martin v. Löwisfd9a72a2006-01-08 10:07:33 +0000718- Patch #881820: look for openpty and forkpty also in libbsd.
719
Martin v. Löwis64c33dd2006-01-03 07:42:14 +0000720- The sources of zlib are now part of the Python distribution (zlib 1.2.3).
721 The zlib module is now builtin on Windows.
722
Martin v. Löwisd5845ec2005-12-30 12:31:38 +0000723- Use -xcode=pic32 for CCSHARED on Solaris with SunPro.
724
Martin v. Löwis147fbe52005-08-07 21:09:30 +0000725- Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
726 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
727
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000728- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
729 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
730
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000731- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
732 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
733 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000734 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000735
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000736- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
737 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
738 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
739
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000740- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
741
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000742- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
743 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
744
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000745- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
746 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
747 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
748 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
749 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
750 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
751 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
752 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
753
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000754- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
755 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
756 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
757 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
758
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000759C API
760-----
761
Raymond Hettingerbeb31012005-08-16 03:47:52 +0000762- Added a C API for set and frozenset objects.
763
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000764- Removed PyRange_New().
765
Walter Dörwaldd1c1e102005-10-06 20:29:57 +0000766- Patch #1313939: PyUnicode_DecodeCharmap() accepts a unicode string as the
767 mapping argument now. This string is used as a mapping table. Byte values
768 greater than the length of the string and 0xFFFE are treated as undefined
769 mappings.
770
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000771
772Tests
773-----
774
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000775- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000776
Hye-Shik Changaaa2f1d2005-12-10 17:44:27 +0000777- Patch #1276356: New resource "urlfetch" is implemented. This enables
778 even impatient people to run tests that require remote files.
779
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000780
781Documentation
782-------------
783
Georg Brandl8cb30772006-01-20 09:34:29 +0000784- Bug #1402224: Add warning to dl docs about crashes.
785
Georg Brandla3a93ae2006-01-20 09:14:36 +0000786- Bug #1396471: Document that Windows' ftell() can return invalid
787 values for text files with UNIX-style line endings.
788
Georg Brandl32252422005-09-14 20:42:00 +0000789- Bug #1274828: Document os.path.splitunc().
790
Georg Brandl79c122f2005-08-24 07:31:33 +0000791- Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py.
792
Georg Brandl6f2bbd32005-08-24 07:26:55 +0000793- Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation.
794
Georg Brandlf13c4ba2005-08-02 10:28:08 +0000795- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
796
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000797- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
798
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000799- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
800
801- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
802
803- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
804
805- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
806
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000807- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
808 Closes bug #1166582.
809
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000810- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
811 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
812 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
813
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000814Mac
815---
816
817
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000818New platforms
819-------------
820
821- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
822
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000823
824Tools/Demos
825-----------
826
Georg Brandl56897312005-08-24 18:32:30 +0000827- Added two new files to Tools/scripts: pysource.py, which recursively
828 finds Python source files, and findnocoding.py, which finds Python
829 source files that need an encoding declaration.
830 Patch #784089, credits to Oleg Broytmann.
831
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000832- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
833
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000834- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000835
Barry Warsaw538561e2006-01-01 21:48:54 +0000836- Fixed a display glitch in Pynche, which could cause the right arrow to
837 wiggle over by a pixel.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000838
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000839What's New in Python 2.4 final?
840===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000841
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000842*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000843
844Core and builtins
845-----------------
846
847- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
848 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
849 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
850
851
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000852What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
853==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000854
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000855*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000856
857Core and builtins
858-----------------
859
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000860- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
861 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
862 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
863
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000864
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000865Library
866-------
867
868- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
869 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
870 raised is re-raised.
871
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000872- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
873 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
874
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000875- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
876 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
877 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
878 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
879 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
880 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
881 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
882 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
883 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
884 by the slice are recomputed now.
885
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000886- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000887
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000888Build
889-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000890
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000891- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
892 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
893 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000894
895C API
896-----
897
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000898- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
899
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000900
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000901What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
902================================
903
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000904*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000905
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000906License
907-------
908
909The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
910is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
911changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
912Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
913intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
914durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
915the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
916License::
917
918 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
919
920says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
921to Python 2.1.1.
922
923The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
924License Version 2.
925
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000926Core and builtins
927-----------------
928
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000929- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
930 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
931 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
932 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
933 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
934 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
935 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
Andrew M. Kuchlingb2a739d2005-11-22 15:14:44 +0000936 ``AttributeError`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000937 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
938 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
939
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000940- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000941
942Extension Modules
943-----------------
944
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000945- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
946 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
947 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
948 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000949
950Library
951-------
952
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000953- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
954 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
955 returned.
956
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000957- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
958
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000959- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
960 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
961
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000962- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
963
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000964- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
965 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000966
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000967- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
968
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000969- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
970
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000971- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000972 the source code is updated and reloaded.
973
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000974Build
975-----
976
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000977- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000978
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000979What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
980================================
981
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000982*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000983
984Core and builtins
985-----------------
986
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000987- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000988 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
989
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000990- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
991 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
992 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
993 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
994
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000995- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
996 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
997
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000998- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
999 constant.
1000
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +00001001- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
1002 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
1003 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
1004 large), and to anomalies such as
1005 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
1006 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
1007 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
1008 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001009
1010Extension modules
1011-----------------
1012
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +00001013- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
1014 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +00001015 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
1016 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
1017 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001018
1019Library
1020-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +00001021
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +00001022- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +00001023 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +00001024 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
1025 --swig-cpp.
1026
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +00001027- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
1028 it is set.
1029
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +00001030- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +00001031
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +00001032- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
1033 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
1034 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
1035 Closes bug #1039270.
1036
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +00001037- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +00001038
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +00001039 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +00001040 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
1041 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
1042 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
1043 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
1044 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
1045 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
1046 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
1047 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
1048 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
1049 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
1050 + Updates to documentation.
1051
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +00001052- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
1053 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
1054 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
1055 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
1056
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +00001057- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001058
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +00001059- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
1060 applications should use the getmember function.
1061
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +00001062- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
1063
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +00001064- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
1065 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
1066 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
1067 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
1068 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
1069 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
1070 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
1071 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
1072 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
1073
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001074- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
1075 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +00001076 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001077
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +00001078- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
1079 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
1080 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
1081 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
1082 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
1083 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
1084 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
1085 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001086
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +00001087- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
1088 the new public features (of which there are many).
1089
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +00001090- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001091 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
1092 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
1093 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
1094 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +00001095 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001096
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +00001097- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
1098
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +00001099- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
1100 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
1101 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
1102 options.
1103
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +00001104- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
1105 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
1106 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
1107 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
1108 conditions under which non-string values work.
1109
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001110Build
1111-----
1112
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +00001113- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
1114 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
1115 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
1116
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +00001117- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
1118 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
1119 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
1120 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
1121 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001122
1123C API
1124-----
1125
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +00001126- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
1127 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
1128
1129- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
1130
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +00001131- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
1132 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
1133 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
1134 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
1135 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
1136 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
1137 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
1138 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
1139 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
1140
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +00001141- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
1142
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +00001143- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
1144 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
1145 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001146
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001147Tests
1148-----
1149
1150- test__locale ported to unittest
1151
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001152Mac
1153---
1154
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +00001155- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
1156 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
1157 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001158
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001159Tools/Demos
1160-----------
1161
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +00001162- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
1163 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
1164 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
1165 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
1166 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001167
1168
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001169What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
1170=================================
1171
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +00001172*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001173
1174Core and builtins
1175-----------------
1176
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001177- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001178 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
1179
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001180- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
1181 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
1182 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
1183 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
1184 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
1185 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
1186 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
1187 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001188 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
1189 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
1190 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
1191 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
1192 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001193
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +00001194- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
1195 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
1196 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
1197 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
1198 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
1199
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +00001200- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
1201
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +00001202- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
1203 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
1204
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +00001205- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
1206 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
1207 modified the list.
1208
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +00001209- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
1210 functions is now writable.
1211
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +00001212- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
1213 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
1214 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
1215 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
1216
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001217- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
1218 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
1219 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
1220 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
1221 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +00001222
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +00001223- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
1224 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
1225
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001226Extension modules
1227-----------------
1228
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001229- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
1230
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +00001231- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
1232 data.
1233
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001234- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
1235 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
1236 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
1237 supposed to have been truncated away.
1238
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +00001239- Added socket.socketpair().
1240
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +00001241- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
1242 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
1243
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001244- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +00001245 versions of Python, have now been removed.
1246
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001247Library
1248-------
1249
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001250- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001251 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001252
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +00001253- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
1254 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
1255
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +00001256- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
1257 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
1258
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001259- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
1260
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +00001261- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
1262 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +00001263
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +00001264- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
1265 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
1266
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +00001267- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
1268
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +00001269- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
1270
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +00001271- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
1272
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +00001273- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
1274 Percivall.
1275
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +00001276- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
1277 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
1278
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001279- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
1280 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
1281 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001282 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001283
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001284- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
1285 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
1286 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
1287 and exponent.
1288
1289- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
1290
1291- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +00001292 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001293 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
1294
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001295- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
1296 to the readline module.
1297
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001298- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001299 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
1300 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001301
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +00001302- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
1303 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
1304 contains symlinks.
1305
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +00001306- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
1307 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
1308
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +00001309- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
1310 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
1311 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1312
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001313- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
1314 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
1315 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
1316 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
1317 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
1318 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
1319 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
1320 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
1321 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
1322 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
1323 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
1324 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
1325 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
1326
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +00001327- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
1328
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001329Tools/Demos
1330-----------
1331
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001332- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
1333 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
1334
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +00001335- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
1336
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001337Build
1338-----
1339
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001340- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
1341 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
1342 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
1343 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
1344 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
1345 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
1346 plans to do so.
1347
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +00001348- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
1349 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
1350
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +00001351- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
1352 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
1353
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001354- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
1355 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
1356
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +00001357- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
1358 GNU/k*BSD systems.
1359
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +00001360- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
1361 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
1362
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001363C API
1364-----
1365
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001366..
1367
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001368Documentation
1369-------------
1370
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001371- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1372 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1373
1374- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1375 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1376 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001377
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001378New platforms
1379-------------
1380
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001381- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1382
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001383Tests
1384-----
1385
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001386..
1387
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001388Windows
1389-------
1390
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001391- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1392 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1393 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1394 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1395 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1396 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1397 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1398 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1399 the problem.
1400
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001401Mac
1402---
1403
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001404..
1405
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001406
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001407What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1408=================================
1409
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001410*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001411
1412Core and builtins
1413-----------------
1414
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001415- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1416 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1417 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1418 sensitive code.
1419
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001420- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001421 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001422
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001423 @staticmethod
1424 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001425
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001426 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001427
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001428- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1429 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1430 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1431 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1432 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1433 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1434 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1435 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1436 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1437 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1438 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1439
1440 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1441 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1442 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1443 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1444 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1445 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1446 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1447
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001448- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1449 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1450
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001451- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001452 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001453
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001454- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001455 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001456 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1457
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001458- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001459 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1460 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1461
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001462- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1463 types that support garbage collection.
1464
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001465- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1466
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001467- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1468 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1469 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1470 Jython.
1471
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001472- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1473
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001474- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1475 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1476
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001477- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1478 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1479 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001480
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001481- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1482 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1483 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1484
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001485Extension modules
1486-----------------
1487
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001488- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1489
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001490Library
1491-------
1492
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001493- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1494 TIS-620
1495
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001496- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1497 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1498 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1499 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1500 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1501 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1502 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1503 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1504 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1505 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1506
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001507- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1508
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001509- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1510 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1511 same as when the argument is omitted).
1512 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1513
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001514- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1515
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001516- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1517 schemes are offered.
1518
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001519- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1520
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001521- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1522 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1523 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1524
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001525- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1526
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001527- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1528 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1529
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001530- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1531 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1532 when dummy_threading is being used.
1533
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001534- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1535 from a tarfile.
1536
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001537- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001538 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001539
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001540- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1541 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1542 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1543 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1544
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001545- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1546 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1547
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001548- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1549 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1550 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1551 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1552 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1553 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1554 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1555 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1556 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1557 by some other method in progress).
1558
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001559- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1560 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1561 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001562
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001563- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1564
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001565- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1566 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1567 AM Kuchling.
1568
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001569- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1570 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1571 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1572
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001573- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1574 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1575 instead of unsigned.
1576
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001577- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001578 no longer part of the public API.
1579
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001580- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1581 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1582 string methods of the same name).
1583
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001584- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001585 SF patch 945642.
1586
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001587- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1588
1589 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1590
1591 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1592 DocTestSuites.
1593
1594- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1595 that provide thread-local data.
1596
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001597- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1598 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1599
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001600- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1601
1602- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1603 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1604 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1605
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001606- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1607
1608 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1609 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1610 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001611
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001612 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1613 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1614 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1615 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1616
1617 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1618 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1619
1620 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1621 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1622 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1623 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1624
1625 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1626 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1627 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1628 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1629 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1630
1631 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1632 wrapping help output.
1633
1634 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1635 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1636 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001637
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001638C API
1639-----
1640
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001641- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1642 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1643 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1644 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1645 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1646 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1647 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1648 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1649 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1650 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1651 its visible semantics have not changed.
1652
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001653- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1654 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1655
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001656Documentation
1657-------------
1658
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001659- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001660
1661 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001662 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001663
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001664 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001665
1666 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1667
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001668- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001669
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001670Tests
1671-----
1672
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001673- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001674 platforms that use the Makefile.
1675
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001676- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1677 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1678 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1679
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001680
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001681What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1682=================================
1683
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001684*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001685
1686Core and builtins
1687-----------------
1688
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001689- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1690 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1691 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1692 objects now (one object instead of three).
1693
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001694- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1695 Windows DLLs.
1696
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001697- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1698 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001699
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001700- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1701 a new .pyc magic.
1702
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001703- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1704 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1705 be there.
1706
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001707- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1708 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1709 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1710
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001711- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1712 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1713 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1714
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001715- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1716
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001717- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1718 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1719 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001720
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001721- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1722 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1723
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001724- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1725
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001726- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001727 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001728
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001729- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1730
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001731- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1732
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001733- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1734 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1735
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001736- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1737 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1738 Fixes bug #858016 .
1739
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001740- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1741 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1742 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1743
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001744- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1745 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1746 improves their performance (about 35%).
1747
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001748- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1749 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1750 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1751
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001752- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1753 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1754 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1755 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1756
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001757- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1758 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001759 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001760 length is not known).
1761
1762- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1763 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001764 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1765 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001766 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1767
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001768- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1769 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1770
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001771- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1772 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1773 keyword arguments.
1774
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001775- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1776 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1777 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1778
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001779- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1780 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1781 cases.
1782
1783- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1784 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1785 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1786 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1787 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1788 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1789 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1790 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1791 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1792 a release build.
1793
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001794- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1795 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1796
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001797- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001798 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001799
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001800- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1801 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1802 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1803 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1804 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1805 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1806 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1807 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1808 destroyed.
1809
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001810- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1811 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1812 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1813 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1814 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1815 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1816 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1817 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1818
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001819- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1820 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1821 character other than a space.
1822
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001823- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1824 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1825 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1826 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1827 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1828 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1829 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1830 attributes with the same name.
1831
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001832- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1833 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1834 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1835 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1836 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1837 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1838 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1839 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1840 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1841 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1842 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1843 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1844 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1845 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001846
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001847- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1848 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1849 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1850 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1851 This has been repaired.
1852
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001853- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1854
1855- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1856
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001857- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1858 over a sequence.
1859
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001860- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001861 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001862
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001863- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1864
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001865- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1866 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1867 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1868 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1869 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1870 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1871 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1872 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1873
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001874- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1875 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1876 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1877
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001878- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1879 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1880 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1881 freelist.
1882
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001883- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1884 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1885
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001886- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1887 number.
1888
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001889- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1890 a TypeError exception.
1891
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001892- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1893 820195.
1894
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001895- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1896 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1897 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1898
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001899- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001900 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1901 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001902
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001903- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1904 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1905 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1906
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001907- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1908 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001909 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001910
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001911- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001912 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1913 the first call.
1914
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001915
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001916Extension modules
1917-----------------
1918
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001919- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1920 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1921
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001922- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1923 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1924 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1925 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1926 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1927 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1928 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001929
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001930- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1931
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001932- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1933
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001934- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1935 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1936
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001937- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1938 fewer false positives.
1939
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001940- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1941 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1942
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001943- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001944 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1945
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001946- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001947 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001948 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001949 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1950 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001951
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001952- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1953 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1954 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1955 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1956
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001957- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1958 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1959 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1960 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1961 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1962 #897625.
1963
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001964- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1965 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1966
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001967- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1968 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1969 and pops on either side of the deque.
1970
1971- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1972 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1973
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001974- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1975 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1976 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1977 other functions that expect a function argument.
1978
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001979- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1980
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001981- os.getsid was added.
1982
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001983- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1984 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1985 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1986
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001987- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1988
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001989- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1990
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001991- readline.clear_history was added.
1992
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001993- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1994
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001995- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1996
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001997- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1998
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001999- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
2000
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00002001- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
2002
2003- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
2004
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00002005- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
2006
2007- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
2008
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00002009- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
2010 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
2011 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
2012
2013- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
2014 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
2015 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
2016 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
2017 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
2018 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
2019 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
2020
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00002021- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
2022 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
2023 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
2024 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00002025
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002026- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00002027 iterators from a single iterable.
2028
2029- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
2030 of raising a TypeError exception.
2031
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00002032- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
2033 as parameter.
2034
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002035Library
2036-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00002037
Armin Rigoa871ef22006-02-08 12:53:56 +00002038- Added a new module: cProfile, a C profiler with the same interface as the
2039 profile module. cProfile avoids some of the drawbacks of the hotshot
2040 profiler and provides a bit more information than the other two profilers.
2041 Based on "lsprof" (patch #1212837).
2042
Georg Brandlf0de6a12005-08-22 18:02:59 +00002043- Bug #1266283: The new function "lexists" is now in os.path.__all__.
2044
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00002045- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
2046 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
2047 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002048
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00002049- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
2050 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
2051 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00002052
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00002053- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00002054
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00002055- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
2056 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00002057
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00002058- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
2059 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
2060
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00002061- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
2062
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00002063- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00002064 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00002065
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002066- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00002067 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002068
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00002069- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
2070
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00002071- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
2072 on cygwin and mingw32.
2073
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00002074- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
2075
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00002076- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
2077 module.
2078
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00002079- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
2080 installation scheme for all platforms.
2081
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00002082- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00002083 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00002084
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00002085- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
2086 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
2087 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
2088
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00002089- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
2090 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
2091 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
2092
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00002093- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
2094
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00002095- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
2096
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00002097- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
2098 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
2099
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00002100- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
2101 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
2102 type pattern with the same value exists.
2103
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00002104- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
2105 when run from the command prompt).
2106
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00002107- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
2108 not taken into consideration when caching value.
2109
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00002110- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
2111 default sort).
2112
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00002113- Added global runctx function to profile module
2114
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00002115- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
2116
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00002117- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
2118
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00002119- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
2120
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002121- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00002122 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
2123 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
2124 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
2125 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
2126 accordingly.
2127
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00002128- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
2129 decoding standards.
2130
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00002131- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
2132 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
2133 called for all requests.
2134
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00002135- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
2136 they are passed to the compiler.
2137
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00002138- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
2139 indent, width and depth.
2140
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00002141- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
2142 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
2143
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00002144- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
2145 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
2146
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00002147- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
2148
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00002149- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
2150
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00002151- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
2152
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00002153- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
2154 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
2155
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00002156- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00002157 for better performance.
2158
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002159- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00002160
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00002161- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
2162 a string).
2163
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00002164- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
2165
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00002166- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
2167
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00002168- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
2169
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00002170- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
2171
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00002172- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
2173 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
2174 list of fieldnames.
2175
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00002176- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
2177 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
2178
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00002179- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
2180
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00002181- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
2182 empty lists.
2183
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00002184- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
2185 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
2186 and shelves.
2187
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00002188- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
2189 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
2190
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002191- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00002192 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
2193 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002194
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00002195- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
2196 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00002197 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00002198
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002199- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00002200 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
2201 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
2202
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002203- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
2204 and removed in Py2.4.
2205
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00002206- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
2207
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00002208- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
2209
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002210Tools/Demos
2211-----------
2212
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00002213- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
2214 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
2215
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00002216- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
2217
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00002218- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
2219 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
2220 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
2221 destination in situations where both files are given.
2222
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00002223- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
2224 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
2225 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
2226 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
2227
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00002228- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
2229
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00002230- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
2231 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
2232 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
2233 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
2234 now.
2235
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002236- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
2237 in effect
2238
2239- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
2240 C-c C-h
2241
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00002242- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
2243 -d option was given.
2244
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002245Build
2246-----
2247
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00002248- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
2249 build under OS X.
2250
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00002251- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
2252 --enable-profiling.
2253
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00002254- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
2255 is configured --with-tsc.
2256
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00002257- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
2258 on AMD64.
2259
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00002260- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
2261 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
2262
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00002263- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
2264 removed.
2265
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00002266- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
2267 supported (see PEP 11).
2268
2269- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
2270
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00002271- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
2272
2273- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
2274 (see PEP 11).
2275
2276- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
2277 sizeof(char) must be 1.
2278
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002279C API
2280-----
2281
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00002282- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
2283 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
2284 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
2285
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00002286- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
2287 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
2288 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
2289 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
2290
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00002291- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
2292 generator objects.
2293
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002294- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
2295 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00002296 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
2297 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002298
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00002299- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
2300 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
2301
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00002302- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
2303 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
2304 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
2305 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
2306 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
2307
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00002308- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
2309 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
2310 about 10% faster.
2311
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00002312- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
2313 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
2314
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00002315- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
2316 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
2317 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
2318 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
2319
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002320Windows
2321-------
2322
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00002323- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
2324 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
2325 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
2326 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
2327
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00002328- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
2329 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
2330 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
2331
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002332
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002333What's New in Python 2.3 final?
2334===============================
2335
2336*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
2337
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002338IDLE
2339----
2340
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00002341- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
2342 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
2343 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
2344 context-menu actions.
2345
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002346- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
2347 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
2348 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
2349 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
2350 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
2351 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
2352 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
2353 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
2354 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
2355
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002356
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002357What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
2358=============================================
2359
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00002360*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002361
2362Core and builtins
2363-----------------
2364
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002365- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002366 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002367 comment at the end are still unsupported.
2368
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002369Extension modules
2370-----------------
2371
2372- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
2373 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
2374 than once. This has been fixed.
2375
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002376- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2377 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2378 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2379 call.
2380
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002381- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2382
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002383Library
2384-------
2385
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002386- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2387 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2388
2389- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2390 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2391 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2392 restored.
2393
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002394IDLE
2395----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002396
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002397- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002398
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002399Build
2400-----
2401
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002402- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2403 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2404
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002405C API
2406-----
2407
2408Windows
2409-------
2410
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002411- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2412 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2413
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002414- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2415
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002416Mac
2417---
2418
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002419- Various fixes to pimp.
2420
2421- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2422
2423- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2424 more problems than it solves.
2425
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002426
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002427What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2428=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002429
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002430*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2431
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002432Core and builtins
2433-----------------
2434
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002435- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2436 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2437
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002438- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2439 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002440 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002441
2442- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2443 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2444 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002445 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002446
2447- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2448 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002449
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002450- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2451 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2452 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2453
2454- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002455 770247.
2456
2457- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002458
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002459Extension modules
2460-----------------
2461
2462- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2463 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2464
2465- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2466
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002467- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2468
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002469- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2470 contained within the _strptime module.
2471
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002472- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2473 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2474
2475- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002476 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2477
2478- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2479 the find_class attribute, if present.
2480
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002481- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002482
2483 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2484 (SF bug 763298).
2485
2486 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002487 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2488 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2489 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002490
2491 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2492
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002493Library
2494-------
2495
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002496- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2497
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002498- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2499 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2500 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2501 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2502 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2503 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2504 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2505 or Tester().
2506
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002507- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2508 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2509 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2510 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2511 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2512 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2513 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2514 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2515 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002516
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002517 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002518
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002519- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2520 weren't before was an oversight.
2521
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002522- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2523 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2524
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002525- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2526 when there are no lines.
2527
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002528- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2529 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2530
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002531- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2532 to child processes.
2533
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002534- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2535
2536- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2537
2538- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2539 xmlrpclib.
2540
2541- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2542 responses.
2543
2544- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2545 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2546
2547- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2548 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2549 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2550
2551- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2552 used as patterns.
2553
2554- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2555 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2556 than Tk 8.3.
2557
2558- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2559
2560- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002561
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002562Tools/Demos
2563-----------
2564
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002565- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2566
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002567- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2568
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002569- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002570
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002571Build
2572-----
2573
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002574- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2575
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002576- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2577
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002578- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2579 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002580
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002581- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2582 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2583 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002584
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002585C API
2586-----
2587
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002588- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2589 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2590
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002591Windows
2592-------
2593
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002594- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2595 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2596 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2597 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2598 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2599 Python exception ::
2600
2601 thread.error: can't start new thread
2602
2603 is raised now.
2604
2605- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2606 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2607 instead of from DLL teardown.
2608
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002609Mac
2610---
2611
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002612- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002613 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002614 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2615 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2616 the executable in the bundle.
2617
2618- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002619
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002620- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2621
2622- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2623 on Panther.
2624
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002625What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2626================================
2627
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002628*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002629
2630Core and builtins
2631-----------------
2632
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002633- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2634 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2635 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2636 with the -i option.
2637
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002638- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2639 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2640
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002641- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2642 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2643
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002644- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2645 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2646 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2647 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2648 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2649 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2650 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2651 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2652 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2653 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2654 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2655 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2656 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002657
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002658- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2659 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2660 embedded in a lambda expression.
2661
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002662- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2663 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2664 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2665 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2666 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2667
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002668- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2669 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2670 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2671
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002672- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2673 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2674
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002675- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2676 It's writable again.
2677
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002678- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2679 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2680 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002681 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002682
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002683- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2684 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2685 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2686
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002687Extension modules
2688-----------------
2689
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002690- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2691 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2692
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002693- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2694 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2695 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2696 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2697
2698- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2699 collection.
2700
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002701- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2702 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2703 unique within a single program run.
2704
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002705- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2706 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2707
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002708- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2709 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2710
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002711- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2712 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002713
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002714- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2715
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002716- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2717 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2718
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002719- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2720 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2721 for many BSD-derived systems.
2722
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002723
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002724Library
2725-------
2726
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002727- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2728 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2729 primary ones:
2730
2731 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2732 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2733 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2734
2735 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2736 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2737 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2738 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2739 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2740 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2741
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002742- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2743 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2744 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2745 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2746 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2747 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2748 argument.
2749
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002750- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2751 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2752 in the archive.
2753
2754- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2755 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2756
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002757- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2758 569574).
2759
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002760- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2761 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2762 no more.
2763
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002764- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2765 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2766 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2767 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2768 code coverage.
2769
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002770- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2771 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2772 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002773 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2774 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002775
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002776- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2777 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2778 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002779 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002780
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002781- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2782
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002783- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2784 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2785 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2786 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2787
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002788- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2789 handling.
2790
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002791- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2792 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2793
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002794- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2795 in socket.py.
2796
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002797- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2798
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002799- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2800 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2801 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2802 opener with proxy support.
2803
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002804- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2805
2806- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2807
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002808Tools/Demos
2809-----------
2810
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002811- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2812
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002813- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2814
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002815- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2816 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002817
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002818- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2819 files.
2820
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002821Build
2822-----
2823
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002824- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002825 different root directory.
2826
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002827C API
2828-----
2829
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002830- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2831 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2832 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2833 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2834 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2835 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2836 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2837 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2838 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2839 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2840
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002841- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2842 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2843 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2844 from Python.
2845
2846
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002847New platforms
2848-------------
2849
2850None this time.
2851
2852Tests
2853-----
2854
2855- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2856 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2857
2858Windows
2859-------
2860
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002861- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2862
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002863- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2864 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2865 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2866 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2867 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2868 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2869 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2870 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2871 that's what it's for.
2872
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002873Mac
2874---
2875
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002876- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2877 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2878 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2879 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002880- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2881 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2882- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002883
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002884SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2885------------------------------------
2886
2887430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2888598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2889622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2890661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2891683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2892697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2893713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2894724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2895727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2896729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2897730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2898731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2899732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2900733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2901735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2902740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2903744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2904745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2905747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2906749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2907751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2908753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2909755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2910757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2911760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2912
2913
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002914What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2915================================
2916
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002917*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002918
2919Core and builtins
2920-----------------
2921
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002922- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2923 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2924
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002925- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2926 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2927 and cannot be strings).
2928
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002929- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2930 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2931 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2932 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2933
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002934- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2935 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2936 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2937 Python itself.
2938
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002939- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2940 the referenced object, if it has one.
2941
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002942- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2943 the thread started at
2944 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2945
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002946- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2947 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2948 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2949 placed on a list index.
2950
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002951- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2952 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2953 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2954 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2955
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002956- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2957 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2958 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2959 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2960 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2961 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2962 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2963
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002964- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2965 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2966 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2967 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2968 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2969
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002970- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2971 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002972
2973- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2974 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2975 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2976 #693195.)
2977
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002978- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2979 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002980
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002981- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002982 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002983 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2984 interpreter executions, would fail.
2985
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002986- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002987 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002988 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002989
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002990Extension modules
2991-----------------
2992
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002993- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2994 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2995 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2996 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2997
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002998- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2999 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
3000
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00003001- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
3002 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
3003 and Greg Chapman.)
3004
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00003005- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
3006 recursively.
3007
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00003008- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00003009 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
3010 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
3011 leaks.
3012
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00003013- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
3014
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00003015- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
3016 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
3017 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
3018 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
3019 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
3020 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
3021 #705836.
3022
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00003023- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00003024 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
3025
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00003026- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
3027 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
3028 See SF bug #692416.
3029
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00003030- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
3031 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
3032
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00003033- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
3034 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
3035 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003036
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00003037- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00003038 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
3039 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
3040
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00003041- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
3042 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
3043 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
3044 timeouts to work properly.
3045
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003046Library
3047-------
3048
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00003049- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
3050 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
3051 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
3052 future release.
3053
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00003054- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
3055 for querying platform dependent features.
3056
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00003057- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00003058
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00003059- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
3060 pickle protocol versions.
3061
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00003062- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
3063 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
3064 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
3065
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00003066- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
3067
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00003068- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
3069 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
3070 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
3071 modules.
3072
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00003073- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
3074 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
3075 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
3076
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00003077- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
3078 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
3079
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00003080- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
3081 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
3082 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
3083
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003084- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00003085 MS Office extensions.
3086
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00003087- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
3088 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
3089
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00003090- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
3091 execution speed of expressions and statements.
3092
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003093- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
3094 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
3095 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
3096 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
3097 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
3098 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
3099
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00003100- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
3101 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
3102 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003103
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00003104- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
3105 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
3106 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
3107
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00003108- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
3109
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00003110- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
3111 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
3112 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
3113
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003114Tools/Demos
3115-----------
3116
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00003117- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
3118 See the module docstring for details.
3119
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003120Build
3121-----
3122
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00003123- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
3124 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003125
3126C API
3127-----
3128
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003129- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
3130
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00003131- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
3132 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
3133 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
3134
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003135- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
3136 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00003137
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003138 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
3139 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
3140 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00003141
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00003142- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00003143 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
3144
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00003145- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
3146 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
3147 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003148
3149New platforms
3150-------------
3151
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00003152None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003153
3154Tests
3155-----
3156
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00003157- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
3158 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003159
3160Windows
3161-------
3162
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00003163- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
3164 function.
3165
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00003166- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
3167 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003168
3169Mac
3170---
3171
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00003172- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
3173 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00003174
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00003175- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
3176 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003177
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00003178- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
3179 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
3180 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003181
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003182- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00003183 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
3184 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003185
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003186- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
3187 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003188
3189
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003190What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
3191=================================
3192
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003193*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003194
3195Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003196-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003197
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00003198- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
3199 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
3200 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
3201
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00003202- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
3203 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
3204 (SF patch #664376.)
3205
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003206- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
3207 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
3208 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
3209 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
3210 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
3211 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00003212 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003213
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003214- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
3215 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
3216 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
3217 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003218 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003219
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00003220- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
3221 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
3222 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
3223 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
3224 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
3225 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
3226 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
3227 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
3228 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
3229 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
3230 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
3231
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00003232- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
3233 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
3234 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
3235 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
3236 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
3237 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
3238
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00003239- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
3240 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
3241
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00003242- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
3243 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
3244 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
3245 case.)
3246
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00003247- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
3248 passed as unicode strings.
3249
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00003250- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
3251 See SF bug #683467.
3252
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00003253- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
3254 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
3255
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00003256- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
3257
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00003258- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
3259
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00003260- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
3261 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
3262 arguments.
3263
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00003264- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
3265 See SF bug #667147.
3266
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003267- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003268 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003269 See SF bug #676155.
3270
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003271- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003272 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003273 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
3274 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
3275 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
3276 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
3277 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
3278 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003279
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003280Extension modules
3281-----------------
3282
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003283- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
3284 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3285 tp_as_number pointer.
3286
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003287- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
3288 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
3289 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
3290 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
3291 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
3292
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003293- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
3294
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00003295- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
3296
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003297- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00003298 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003299 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
3300 patch #678531.)
3301
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00003302- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
3303 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
3304
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00003305- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
3306 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
3307
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00003308- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
3309
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00003310- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
3311 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
3312 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
3313
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003314- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
3315
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003316- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
3317 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
3318
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003319- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003320
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003321- datetime changes:
3322
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00003323 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
3324
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003325 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
3326 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
3327 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
3328 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
3329 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
3330 now.
3331
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003332 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003333 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
3334 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003335
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003336 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003337 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003338 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
3339 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
3340 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
3341 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003342
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003343 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
3344 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
3345 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003346 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
3347
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003348 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
3349 by a later example coded by Guido.
3350
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003351 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003352 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
3353 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
3354 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003355 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
3356 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
3357
3358 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
3359 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
3360 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
3361 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
3362 tzinfo subclass instance.
3363
3364 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
3365 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
3366 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
3367 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
3368 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
3369 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
3370 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
3371 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003372
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003373 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
3374 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3375 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3376 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3377 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003378 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3379
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003380 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003381
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003382 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3383 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3384 as a naive datetime object.
3385
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003386 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3387 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3388 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3389
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003390 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3391 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3392 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3393 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3394 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3395 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3396 comparison.
3397
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003398 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3399 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3400 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3401 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003402 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003403
3404 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003405
3406 and ::
3407
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003408 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3409
3410 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3411 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3412 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3413 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3414
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003415 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3416 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3417 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3418 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3419 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3420
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003421 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3422 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003423 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3424 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003425
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003426Library
3427-------
3428
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003429- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3430 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3431
3432- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3433 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3434 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3435 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3436 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3437 See PEP 307 for details.
3438
3439- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3440 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3441
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003442- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3443 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003444 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003445 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3446 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003447 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003448
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003449- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3450 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3451
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003452- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3453 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3454 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3455
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003456- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3457
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003458- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3459 exception.
3460
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003461- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3462 class.
3463
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003464- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3465 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3466 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3467
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003468- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3469 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3470
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003471- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003472 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3473 See SF bug #659228.
3474
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003475- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3476 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3477 See SF patch #651082.
3478
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003479- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003480
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003481- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3482 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3483
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003484- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003485 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003486
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003487- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3488 DOS paths from other platforms.
3489
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003490Tools/Demos
3491-----------
3492
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003493- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3494 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3495 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3496 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3497 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3498 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3499 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3500 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3501 example:
3502
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003503 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3504 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003505
3506 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3507
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003508
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003509Build
3510-----
3511
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003512- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3513 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3514 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003515 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3516
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003517 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3518
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003519- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3520 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3521 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3522 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3523 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3524 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3525 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3526 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3527 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3528
3529- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3530 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3531 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3532 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3533
3534- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3535 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3536
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003537C API
3538-----
3539
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003540- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3541 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003542
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003543- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3544 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3545 tp_as_number pointer.
3546
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003547- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3548 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3549 (SF #681367)
3550
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003551- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3552 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3553 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3554 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003555
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003556Tests
3557-----
3558
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003559- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003560 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3561 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3562 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3563 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3564 pydoc.)
3565
3566- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3567
3568- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003569
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003570Windows
3571-------
3572
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003573- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3574 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3575 time).
3576
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003577- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3578 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3579
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003580- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3581 release without strong cryptography.
3582
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003583- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003584 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003585
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003586- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3587 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3588
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003589Mac
3590---
3591
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003592- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3593 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003594
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003595- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3596 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3597 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003598
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003599- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3600 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003601
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003602- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3603 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3604 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3605 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003606
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003607- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003608 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3609 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3610 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003611
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003612
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003613What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003614=================================
3615
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003616*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003617
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003618Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003619--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003620
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003621- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3622
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003623- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3624 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003625 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003626 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003627 a different meaning than before.
3628
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003629- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003630 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003631 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003632
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003633- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003634 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003635 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003636
3637- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3638 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3639 and deallocation.
3640
3641- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3642 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3643
3644- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3645 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3646 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3647 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3648 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3649
3650- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3651 now detected by the garbage collector.
3652
3653- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3654 [SF bug 519621]
3655
3656- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3657 identifier.
3658
3659- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3660 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3661 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3662 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3663 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3664 [SF bug 563060]
3665
3666- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3667 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3668 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3669 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3670 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3671
3672- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3673 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3674 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3675
3676- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3677
3678- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3679 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3680 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3681 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3682 state of the slots would be lost.)
3683
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003684Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003685-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003686
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003687- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003688 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3689 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3690 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3691 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003692 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3693 Jython 2.1.
3694
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003695- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003696 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003697 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3698 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3699 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3700 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3701 these, see PEP 302.
3702
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003703- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3704 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3705 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3706
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003707- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3708 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3709 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3710
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003711- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3712 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3713 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3714
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003715- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3716 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3717 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3718 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3719 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3720 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3721 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3722 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3723 releases or implementations.
3724
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003725- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003726 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3727 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003728
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003729- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3730 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3731
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003732- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3733 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3734 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3735
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003736- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3737 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3738
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003739- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3740 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003741 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3742 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003743
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003744- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3745 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3746 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3747 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3748 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3749
3750 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3751 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3752 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3753 pattern.
3754
3755 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3756 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3757 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3758 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3759
3760 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3761 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3762 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3763 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3764 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3765 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3766
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003767- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3768 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3769 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3770 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3771 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3772 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3773 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3774 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003775
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003776- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3777 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3778 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3779 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3780 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003781 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3782 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3783 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3784 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3785 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3786 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3787 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003788
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003789- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3790 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3791
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003792- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3793 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3794 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3795 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3796 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3797 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3798 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3799 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3800 to Zack Weinberg!
3801
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003802- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3803 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3804 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3805 type. This has been fixed now.
3806
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003807- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3808 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3809 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3810
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003811- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3812 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3813 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3814 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3815 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3816 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3817 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3818 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003819 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003820
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003821- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3822 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3823 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003824
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003825- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3826 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3827 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3828 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3829 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3830 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3831 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3832 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003833 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003834 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3835 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3836
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003837- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3838 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3839 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3840 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3841 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3842 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3843 this.)
3844
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003845- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3846 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003847 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003848 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003849 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3850 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003851 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3852 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003853
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003854- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3855 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3856 currently running.
3857
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003858- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3859 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3860 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3861 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3862
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003863- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3864 as directory names.
3865
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003866- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3867 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3868
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003869- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3870 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3871
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003872- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003873 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3874 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003875
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003876- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3877 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3878 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3879 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3880 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3881
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003882- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3883 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3884 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3885 removed.
3886
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003887- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3888 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3889 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3890
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003891- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3892 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3893 to __debug__.
3894
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003895- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3896 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3897 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3898
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003899- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3900 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3901 deprecated now.
3902
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003903- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3904 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3905 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003906
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003907- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3908 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3909 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3910 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3911 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003912
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003913- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3914 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3915
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003916- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3917 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3918 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003919 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003920 is backward compatible.
3921
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003922- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3923 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3924 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3925 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3926 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3927
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003928- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3929 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3930 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3931 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3932 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3933 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003934
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003935- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3936 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3937
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003938- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3939 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3940
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003941- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3942 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3943 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3944 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3945 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3946
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003947- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3948 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3949 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3950
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003951- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003952 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3953
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003954- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3955 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3956 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003957
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003958- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3959 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3960
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003961- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3962 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3963 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3964
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003965- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3966
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003967Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003968-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003969
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003970- Added three operators to the operator module:
3971 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3972 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3973 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3974
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003975- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3976
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003977- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3978 archives.
3979
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003980- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3981 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3982 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3983
3984 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3985
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003986- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3987 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3988 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003989 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003990
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003991- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3992 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3993 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3994 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003995 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3996 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3997 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3998 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003999
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00004000- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
4001 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00004002
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00004003- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
4004
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00004005- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
4006 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
4007
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00004008- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
4009 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
4010 supported.
4011
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00004012- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
4013
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00004014- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
4015 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00004016
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00004017- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
4018 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
4019
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00004020- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
4021
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00004022- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
4023 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
4024
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00004025- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
4026 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
4027 functions but callable type objects.
4028
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004029- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00004030 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004031 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00004032
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00004033- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
4034 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00004035
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00004036- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
4037 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00004038
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00004039- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
4040 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
4041 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
4042 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
4043
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00004044- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
4045 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00004046
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00004047- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
4048 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
4049 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
4050 and __imul__.
4051
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00004052- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00004053 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
4054 is called.
4055
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00004056- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
4057 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
4058 interpreter was compiled.
4059
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00004060- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
4061 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
4062 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004063 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00004064 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
4065 1, not 2.
4066
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00004067- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
4068 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
4069 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
4070 limit.
4071
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00004072- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
4073 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
4074 bug #623464.
4075
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00004076- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
4077 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
4078 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
4079 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
4080
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004081Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004082-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004083
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00004084- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
4085
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00004086- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
4087 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
4088 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
4089 with Python 2.3a2.
4090
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00004091- os.path exposes getctime.
4092
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004093- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004094 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004095 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004096 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004097 unit tests of floating point results.
4098
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00004099- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
4100 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
4101 has been increased.
4102
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00004103- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
4104 executed.
4105
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00004106- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
4107 postinstallation script.
4108
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00004109- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
4110 test the current module.
4111
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004112- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00004113 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
4114 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
4115 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
4116 this behavior needs to be controlled.
4117
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00004118- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00004119 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00004120 Ward's Optik package.
4121
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00004122- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
4123 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
4124 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
4125 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
4126
4127- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
4128 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00004129 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00004130
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00004131- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
4132 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
4133 shelf are binary pickles.
4134
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00004135- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
4136 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
4137
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00004138- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
4139 modules are iterators now.
4140
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00004141- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
4142 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
4143 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
4144 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
4145 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
4146 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004147
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00004148- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
4149 with their entity value.
4150
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00004151- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
4152
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004153- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
4154 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00004155
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004156- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
4157 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004158 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00004159
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00004160- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
4161 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
4162 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
4163 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
4164 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
4165 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
4166 main():
4167
4168 import locale
4169 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
4170
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00004171- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
4172 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
4173
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00004174- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
4175 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
4176 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
4177 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
4178 to the new standard.
4179
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00004180- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
4181 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
4182 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
4183 an extension to the database.
4184
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004185- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
4186 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
4187 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
4188 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00004189 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004190
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004191- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00004192 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004193
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00004194- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
4195 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
4196 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
4197 bounded integers.
4198
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00004199- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
4200 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
4201 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
4202 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
4203 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
4204 in existence.
4205
4206 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
4207 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
4208 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
4209 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
4210 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
4211 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
4212
4213 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
4214 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
4215 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
4216 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
4217
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00004218- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
4219 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
4220 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
4221
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00004222- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
4223
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004224- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
4225 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
4226 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
4227 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
4228
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00004229- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
4230 argument.
4231
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00004232- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
4233 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
4234 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
4235 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
4236 [SF patch 560794].
4237
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004238- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
4239 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
4240 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00004241 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
4242 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
4243 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004244
4245- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
4246 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00004247
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00004248- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
4249 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
4250 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
4251 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00004252
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00004253- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
4254 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
4255 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
4256 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
4257 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
4258
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004259- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00004260
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00004261- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
4262
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00004263- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
4264 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
4265 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
4266 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
4267 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
4268 identical to None.
4269
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00004270- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
4271 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
4272 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
4273 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
4274 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
4275 results now.
4276
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00004277- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
4278 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
4279
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004280- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
4281 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
4282 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
4283 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
4284 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
4285 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
4286 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
4287 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
4288
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00004289- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
4290
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00004291- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
4292 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
4293
4294- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
4295 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
4296 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
4297 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
4298 and other systems.
4299
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004300- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
4301 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
4302 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
4303 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 +00004304 work well with these.
4305
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00004306- compileall now supports quiet operation.
4307
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004308- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00004309 connections.
4310
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00004311- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
4312 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
4313 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
4314
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00004315- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
4316 sets
4317
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00004318- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
4319 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
4320 name.
4321
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00004322- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
4323 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
4324 passed in.
4325
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004326- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00004327 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00004328 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
4329 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00004330
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00004331- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
4332
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00004333- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
4334
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00004335- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
4336 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
4337 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
4338
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004339- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
4340 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
4341 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
4342 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00004343 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004344
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004345- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004346 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004347 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004348
4349- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
4350 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
4351 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
4352
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004353- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00004354 the value of its expression argument.
4355
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004356- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
4357 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
4358 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
4359
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00004360- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
4361 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
4362 skipstone browser was included.
4363
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00004364- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
4365 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
4366
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004367Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004368-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004369
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00004370- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
4371 names in addition to accepting file names.
4372
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00004373- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
4374 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4375 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4376 still used and useful.)
4377
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004378- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4379 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4380 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4381 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004382
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004383- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4384 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4385 the generated binary.
4386
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004387Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004388-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004389
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004390- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4391
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004392- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4393 except in the hands of experts.
4394
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004395- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004396 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4397 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4398 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004399
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004400- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4401 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4402 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4403 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4404 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4405 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4406 builds.
4407
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004408- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4409 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4410 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4411 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4412 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4413 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4414 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4415 new type.
4416
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004417- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004418
4419 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4420 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4421 positive infinities.
4422
4423 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4424 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4425 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4426 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4427 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4428 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4429 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4430
4431 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4432
4433 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4434
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004435- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4436 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4437 size of the executable.
4438
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004439- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4440 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4441 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4442 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004443
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004444- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4445
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004446- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4447 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4448 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004449
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004450- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4451 well as Unix.
4452
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004453- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4454 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4455 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4456 modules in the README file for details.
4457
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004458C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004459-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004460
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004461- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4462 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004463 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004464 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004465 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004466
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004467- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4468 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4469 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4470 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4471 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4472 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004473 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004474 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4475 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4476 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4477 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4478 aligned.)
4479
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004480- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4481 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4482 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4483
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004484- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4485 level.
4486
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004487- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4488 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4489 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4490 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4491 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4492
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004493- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4494 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4495 code.
4496
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004497- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4498 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4499 adjusting for negative indices.
4500
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004501- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4502 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4503 object.
4504
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004505- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4506 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4507 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4508
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004509- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4510 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004511
4512- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4513
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004514- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4515 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4516 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4517 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4518
4519- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4520
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004521- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004522
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004523- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004524 without going through the buffer API.
4525
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004526- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004527
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004528- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4529 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4530 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4531 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4532
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004533- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4534 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4535
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004536- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004537 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4538
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004539New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004540-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004541
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004542- OpenVMS is now supported.
4543
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004544- AtheOS is now supported.
4545
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004546- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4547
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004548- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4549
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004550Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004551-----
4552
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004553- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4554 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4555 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004556
4557Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004558-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004559
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004560- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4561 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4562 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4563 bugs.
4564 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004565 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004566 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4567 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004568 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004569
4570- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004571 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004572
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004573- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4574 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4575
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004576- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4577 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004578 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004579 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4580
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004581- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4582 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4583 use files" uninstall option).
4584
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004585- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4586
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004587- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4588 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4589
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004590- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4591 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4592 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4593
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004594- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4595 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4596 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4597 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4598 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004599 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4600 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4601 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004602
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004603- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004604 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004605 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4606 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4607 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4608 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4609 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4610 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4611 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4612 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4613 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4614 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4615 work around.
4616
4617- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4618 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4619 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4620 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4621 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4622 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4623 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4624 specified with O_CREAT too).
4625
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004626Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004627----
4628
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004629- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004630
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004631- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4632 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4633 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4634
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004635- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4636 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4637 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4638
4639- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4640 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4641 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4642 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4643 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4644 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4645 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4646 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004647
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004648- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4649 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4650 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004651
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004652- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4653 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4654 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4655 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4656 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004657
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004658- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4659 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4660 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004661
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004662- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4663 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004664
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004665- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4666 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4667 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4668 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4669 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004670
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004671- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4672 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4673 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4674
4675- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4676 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4677 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004678
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004679- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4680 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4681 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4682 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004683 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004684
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004685- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4686 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004687
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004688- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4689 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004690
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004691- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004692 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004693 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4694 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004695
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004696
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004697What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004698===============================
4699
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004700*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4701
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004702Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004703--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004704
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004705- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4706 with a custom metaclass.
4707
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004708Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004709-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004710
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004711- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4712 are proxies.
4713
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004714Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004715-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004716
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004717- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4718 very short strings.
4719
4720- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4721 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4722 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4723 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4724 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4725
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004726Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004727-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004728
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004729- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4730 close or delete time).
4731
4732- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4733 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4734
4735- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4736
4737- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004738 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004739
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004740Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004741-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004742
4743Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004744-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004745
4746C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004747-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004748
4749New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004750-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004751
4752Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004753-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004754
4755Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004756-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004757
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004758- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4759
4760- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4761 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4762
4763- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4764 deleted at process exit time.
4765
4766- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4767 in backslash.
4768
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004769Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004770----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004771
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004772- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4773 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4774 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4775
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004776
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004777What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004778===========================
4779
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004780*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4781
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004782Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004783--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004784
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004785- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4786 been extensively updated. See
4787
4788 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4789
4790 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4791
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004792- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4793 deleted!
4794
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004795- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4796 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4797 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4798 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4799 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4800
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004801- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4802
4803 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4804 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4805
4806 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4807 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4808 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4809 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4810 supported anyway.
4811
4812 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4813 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4814
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004815- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4816 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4817 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4818 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4819 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004820
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004821- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4822 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4823 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4824
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004825Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004826-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004827
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004828- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4829 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4830 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4831 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4832 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4833 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004834 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4835 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4836 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4837 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004838
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004839- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4840 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4841 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4842
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004843Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004844-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004845
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004846- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4847
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004848Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004849-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004850
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004851- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4852 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4853 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4854 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4855 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4856 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4857
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004858- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4859
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004860- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4861
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004862- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4863
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004864- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4865 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4866 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4867
4868- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4869
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004870Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004871-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004872
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004873- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4874 off a search on Google.
4875
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004876Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004877-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004878
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004879- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4880 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4881 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4882 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4883 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4884 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4885 other platforms should do likewise.
4886
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004887- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4888 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4889 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4890
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004891C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004892-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004893
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004894- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4895 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4896 producing key-value pairs.
4897
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004898- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004899 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004900 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4901 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4902 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4903 previously went unchallenged.
4904
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004905New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004906-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004907
4908Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004909-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004910
4911Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004912-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004913
4914Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004915----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004916
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004917- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4918 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004919
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004920- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4921 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4922 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4923 home.
4924
4925
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004926What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004927===========================
4928
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004929*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4930
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004931Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004932--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004933
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004934- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4935 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004936
4937 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004938 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004939
4940 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4941 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004942 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004943 This needs to be documented.
4944
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004945- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4946 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4947
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004948- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4949 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4950 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4951
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004952- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4953 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4954
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004955- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4956 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4957 class forbids it).
4958
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004959- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4960 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4961 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4962
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004963- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4964
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004965Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004966-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004967
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004968- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4969 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004970 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004971
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004972- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4973 (like 1 + '').
4974
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004975Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004976-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004977
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004978- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4979 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4980 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4981 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004982 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004983 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4984
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004985- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4986 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4987 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4988 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4989
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004990- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4991 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004992 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4993 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4994 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004995
4996- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4997 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004998
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004999- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
5000 bytes on its input.
5001
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005002Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005003-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005004
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00005005- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00005006 convenience function.
5007
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00005008- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
5009 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
5010 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005011 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
5012 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
5013 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
5014 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
5015 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
5016 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00005017
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00005018- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
5019 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
5020 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
5021 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
5022
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00005023- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
5024 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
5025 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
5026
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00005027- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
5028 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
5029 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
5030 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
5031
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005032- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
5033 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005034 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005035 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
5036 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
5037 new -l and -e options.
5038
5039- statcache is now deprecated.
5040
5041- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
5042 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005043 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005044 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
5045 time properly taken into account.
5046
5047- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
5048 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
5049 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
5050 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
5051
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005052Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005053-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005054
5055Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005056-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005057
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005058- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
5059 is built with libdb3 if available.
5060
5061- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
5062
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005063C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005064-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005065
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00005066- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
5067 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
5068 PySequence_Size().
5069
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005070- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
5071
5072- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
5073 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
5074 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
5075
5076- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
5077 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
5078
5079- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
5080 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
5081
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005082New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005083-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005084
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00005085- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
5086 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
5087
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00005088- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
5089 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
5090
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00005091- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
5092
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005093Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005094-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005095
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00005096- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
5097 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
5098
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005099Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005100-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005101
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005102Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005103----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005104
5105- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
5106 removed completely in the next release.
5107
5108- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
5109 OSX.
5110
5111- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
5112 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
5113
5114- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
5115
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005116
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005117What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005118===========================
5119
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005120*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
5121
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005122Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005123--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005124
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005125- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005126 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005127 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005128 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
5129 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005130 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
5131 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005132 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
5133 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00005134
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00005135- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
5136 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
5137
5138- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
5139 class methods, static methods, and properties.
5140
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005141Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005142-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005143
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00005144- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
5145 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
5146 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
5147 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
5148 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
5149 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
5150 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
5151 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
5152
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005153- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
5154 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
5155 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
5156 example).
5157
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005158- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005159 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005160 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005161 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005162
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005163- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
5164 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
5165 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00005166 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005167
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005168- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
5169 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
5170 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
5171 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
5172 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
5173 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
5174
5175 isinstance(x, (A, B))
5176
5177 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
5178
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005179Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005180-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005181
5182- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
5183
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005184- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
5185
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005186- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
5187 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00005188
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005189- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
5190 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
5191 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
5192 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
5193 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
5194 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00005195 attributes.
5196
5197- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
5198 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
5199 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00005200
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005201- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
5202 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
5203 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005204
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005205- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
5206 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
5207 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005208 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
5209 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
5210
5211- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
5212 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005213
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005214Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005215-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005216
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00005217- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
5218 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
5219
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005220- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
5221 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
5222 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
5223 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
5224
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00005225- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
5226 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
5227 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
5228 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
5229
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00005230 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
5231 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
5232 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
5233 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
5234 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
5235 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
5236 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
5237 without losing information).
5238
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005239- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005240 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
5241 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
5242 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
5243 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
5244 module).
5245
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00005246 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005247 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
5248 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
5249 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
5250 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005251
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005252- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00005253 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
5254 encoding.
5255
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00005256- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
5257 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
5258
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005259- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005260 to allow saving the message body to a file.
5261
5262- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
5263 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
5264 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
5265 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
5266
5267- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
5268
5269- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
5270 ON, and OFF.
5271
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005272- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
5273 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
5274
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005275Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005276-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005277
5278- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
5279 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
5280 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005281
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005282- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
5283 been added: -X and -E.
5284
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005285Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005286-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005287
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005288- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
5289 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
5290
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005291C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005292-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005293
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00005294- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
5295 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
5296 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
5297 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
5298 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
5299
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00005300- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
5301 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
5302 as long) arguments.
5303
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005304- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
5305 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
5306 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
5307 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
5308 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
5309 report any bugs or strange behavior).
5310
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005311- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
5312 input.
5313
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005314New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005315-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005316
5317Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005318-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005319
5320Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005321-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005322
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00005323- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
5324 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
5325 is created for .py and .pyw files.
5326
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005327- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
5328 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
5329 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005330 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005331
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005332 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
5333 # (SIGINT) behavior.
5334 import signal
5335 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005336
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005337 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005338 while 1:
5339 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005340 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005341 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
5342 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
5343 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
5344 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005345
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005346
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005347What's New in Python 2.2a4?
5348===========================
5349
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005350*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
5351
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005352Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005353--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005354
5355- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
5356 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
5357 documentation for all operations on list objects.
5358
5359- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
5360 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
5361 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
5362 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
5363 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
5364 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
5365 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005366
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005367- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005368 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005369 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
5370 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
5371 associate a docstring with a property.
5372
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005373- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
5374 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5375 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5376 other built-in object types.
5377
5378- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5379 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5380 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5381 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5382 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5383
5384- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5385 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5386
5387- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5388 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005389 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005390 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5391 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5392 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5393 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5394 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5395
5396- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5397 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5398 class.
5399
5400- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5401 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5402 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5403 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5404
5405- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5406 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5407 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5408 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5409
5410- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5411 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5412
5413- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5414 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5415 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5416 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5417 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005418 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005419 with the same value as s.
5420
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005421- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5422
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005423Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005424----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005425
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005426- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5427
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005428- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5429 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5430 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5431 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5432 objects.
5433
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005434- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5435 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005436 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5437 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5438
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005439- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5440 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5441 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5442
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005443Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005444-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005445
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005446- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5447 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5448 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5449 by the instances.
5450
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005451- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5452 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5453 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5454
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005455- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5456 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5457 before the entire comparison is complete.
5458
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005459- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5460 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5461 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5462
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005463- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5464 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5465 getwriter().
5466
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005467- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5468 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5469
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005470- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005471 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5472 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5473
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005474- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5475 iterable object.
5476
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005477- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5478 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005479
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005480- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5481 authentication.
5482
5483- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5484 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005485
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005486- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005487 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5488 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5489 a sample driver.)
5490
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005491Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005492-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005493
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005494- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5495 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5496 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5497 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5498 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5499 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5500 kernel has large file support.
5501
5502- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5503 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5504 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5505 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5506 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5507
5508- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5509 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5510 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5511
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005512C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005513-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005514
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005515- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5516 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5517
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005518New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005519-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005520
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005521- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5522 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5523
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005524Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005525-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005526
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005527- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5528 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5529 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5530 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5531 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5532
5533- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5534 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5535 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5536 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5537
5538- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5539 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5540
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005541Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005542-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005543
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005544- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005545 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5546 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005547
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005548
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005549What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5550===========================
5551
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005552*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5553
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005554Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005555----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005556
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005557- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5558 big to represent as a C double.
5559
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005560- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5561 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5562 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5563 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5564 restriction).
5565
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005566- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5567 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5568 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5569 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5570 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5571
5572 >>> dir([])
5573 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5574 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5575 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5576 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5577 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5578 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5579 'reverse', 'sort']
5580
5581 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5582
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005583- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005584 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5585 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5586 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5587 OverflowError exception.
5588
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005589- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005590 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005591 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5592 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5593 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5594 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5595 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005596 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005597 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5598 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5599
5600 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5601 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5602 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5603 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005604
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005605- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005606 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5607 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5608 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5609 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5610 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5611 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5612 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5613 once it is created.
5614
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005615- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5616 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5617 (key, value) pairs.
5618
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005619- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005620 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5621 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5622
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005623- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5624 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5625 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5626 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5627 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005628
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005629- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005630 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5631 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5632
5633 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5634
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005635- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005636 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5637
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005638Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005639-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005640
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005641- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005642 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5643 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005644
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005645- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5646 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5647 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5648 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5649 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5650 in this area anymore).
5651
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005652- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5653 threading.Timer.
5654
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005655- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5656 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5657
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005658- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005659 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5660
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005661- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005662 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5663 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5664 converted to Python longs.
5665
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005666- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005667 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5668
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005669- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5670 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5671 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5672
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005673Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005674-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005675
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005676- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5677 division operators as per PEP 238.
5678
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005679Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005680-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005681
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005682- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5683 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5684 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5685 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5686
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005687C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005688-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005689
5690- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005691
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005692- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5693 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005694 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005695
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005696 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5697 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005698 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005699 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005700
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005701- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005702 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5703 module:
5704
5705 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005706
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005707 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5708 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005709
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005710 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5711 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005712
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005713 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5714
5715 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5716
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005717- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005718 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5719 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5720 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005721
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005722New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005723-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005724
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005725- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5726 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5727 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5728 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5729 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005730
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005731Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005732-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005733
5734Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005735-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005736
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005737- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5738 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5739 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5740 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005741 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5742 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5743 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5744 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5745 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005746
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005747- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005748 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5749
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005750
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005751What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5752===========================
5753
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005754*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5755
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005756Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005757-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005758
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005759- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5760 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5761
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005762- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5763 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5764 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005765
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005766- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5767 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5768 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5769 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005770
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005771- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5772
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005773- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005774
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005775Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005776-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005777
5778- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005779 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005780 the module docstring for details.
5781
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005782Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005783-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005784
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005785- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005786 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5787 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5788 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005789
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005790- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5791 Nick Mathewson.
5792
5793Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005794----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005795
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005796- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5797 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5798 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5799 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5800 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5801 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5802 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5803 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5804
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005805- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5806 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5807 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5808 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5809
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005810- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5811 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5812 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5813 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5814 come a long way).
5815
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005816- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5817 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5818 write filters for these warnings).
5819
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005820- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5821 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5822 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5823 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5824 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5825
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005826- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5827 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5828 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5829 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5830 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5831 older distribution.
5832
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005833Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005834-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005835
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005836- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5837 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005838 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005839
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005840- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5841 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5842 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5843
5844- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5845
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005846- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5847
5848- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5849
5850- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5851
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005852- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005853
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005854- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5855
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005856New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005857-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005858
5859C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005860-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005861
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005862- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5863 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5864 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5865 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5866 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5867 against buffer overruns.
5868
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005869- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005870 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5871 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005872 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5873 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5874 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5875
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005876- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5877 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5878 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5879 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5880 deprecated.
5881
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005882Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005883-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005884
5885- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5886 relevant is found.
5887
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005888
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005889What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005890===========================
5891
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005892*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5893
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005894Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005895----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005896
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005897- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5898 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5899 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5900 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5901 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5902 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5903 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5904 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005905 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005906 repaired.
5907
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005908- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005909 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005910 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5911 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5912 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5913 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5914 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5915 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5916 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5917 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5918
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005919- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5920 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5921 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5922 leading BMO character).
5923
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005924- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5925 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5926 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5927
5928 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5929 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5930 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005931
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005932 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5933 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5934 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5935 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5936 for various simple to use conversions.
5937
5938 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5939 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5940
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005941 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5942 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5943 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5944 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5945 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5946 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5947 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5948 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5949 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5950 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5951 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5952 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5953 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5954 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5955 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005956
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005957- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5958 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5959 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005960 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005961 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005962
5963 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005964 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5965 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5966 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5967 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5968 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005969 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5970 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005971
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005972 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5973 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5974 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005975 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005976
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005977- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5978 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5979 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5980 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5981 floating arithmetic,
5982
5983 x = 9007199254740992.0
5984 print long(x)
5985
5986 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5987 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5988 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5989 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5990 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5991 functions are of good quality).
5992
5993 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5994 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5995 algorithms to break.
5996
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005997- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5998 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5999 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
6000 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
6001 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
6002 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
6003 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
6004 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
6005 order.
6006
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00006007- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
6008 operation along the most common code paths.
6009
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00006010- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
6011 the same as dict.has_key(x).
6012
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00006013- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
6014 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
6015 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
6016 {}.update(UserDict())
6017
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00006018- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
6019 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
6020 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
6021 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
6022 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
6023 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
6024 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
6025 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
6026
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00006027- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00006028 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006029
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00006030 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00006031 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
6032 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00006033 join() method of strings
6034 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00006035 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
6036 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006037 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00006038 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00006039
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00006040- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
6041 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
6042
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00006043- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
6044 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
6045
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00006046- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
6047 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
6048 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
6049 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
6050
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00006051- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
6052 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00006053 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00006054 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
6055 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00006056
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00006057- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
6058
6059
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006060Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006061-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006062
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00006063- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006064 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00006065 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
6066 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
6067
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00006068- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
6069 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
6070
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00006071- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
6072 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
6073 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
6074 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
6075
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00006076- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
6077 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
6078 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
6079
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00006080- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
6081
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00006082- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
6083
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00006084- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
6085 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
6086 that are still imported into string.py).
6087
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006088- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
6089
6090- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
6091 Now it does.
6092
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00006093- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
6094
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00006095- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
6096 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
6097 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
6098 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
6099 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00006100 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
6101 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00006102
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00006103- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
6104 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
6105 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
6106 'help(object)'.
6107
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006108Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006109-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006110
6111- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006112 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006113 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
6114 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
6115
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006116- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00006117 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
6118 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006119
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00006120C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006121-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00006122
6123- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
6124 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006125
6126----
6127
6128**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**